Finbar Flanagan

I don’t get to see cats is an exploration of the voice of the child throughout the Covid 19 pandemic, visualising their emotional response to the restrictions and changes in their environment.

The title of the book was one of the children’s responses to what they had realised in the the current 2020 lockdown.

I documented the children over a number of months recording conversations and asking them to draw pictures of what believed felt Covid 19 looked like or how it felt to them.

Obscuring the children in the images was a way of visualising how their voices were not being heard as all the adults in their lives were in survival mode.

I made images of elusive cats to play off the title of the book and to symbolise at the time of making this book that there seemed to be no end to the pandemic and would the girl get to see a cat again.