Lock it Down ! (2021)

Whilst globes have been around since the 2nd century BC, it was only on the eve of the Renaissance that a German polymath devised the first terrestrial globe as a scale model of Earth. Contrary to a 2D map, the supreme advantage of a globe was that it did not distort the surface it portrayed, just scaled it down, keeping distances and proportions.

Beyond plain geographic literacy, with just a single spin, a student could learn the differences in cultures between countries, fostering a global understanding of the world at large and giving meaning to the concept of global citizenship. Once omnipresent in every classroom of the civilized world, practically every child of Nicholls’s generation would recognize the sacrosanct spinning globe. It stood as a symbol of everything that existed beyond the child’s world. It stood as symbol of freedom and was designed to foster an appetite for discovery.

By choosing the ubiquitous globe, shading it black, erasing all specifics, and by replacing the network of latitude and longitude lines with thick and studded straps of steel, Nicholls expresses how lockdowns, as a quasi-universal response to the pandemic, denied the interconnectivity of the world as we knew it. Nicholls’s foreboding globe shows how, by denying the freedom to freely travel, the world outside our doors became unrecognizable.

The dulled and blackened surface of the sphere, trapped between straps, does not just erase frontiers but negates cultural diversity. By caging the sphere, obliterating topography and landmarks, the artist shows how restriction of movement curbed critical thinking, becoming one undifferentiated mass, one black ball. Lock it Down  (2021) stands as a permanent reminder of a point in history when the vital interconnectivity of our world was literally caged, human connection all but halted, normalcy forever altered.