1 Year Anniversary of Banksy’s Norfolk Takeover.

It’s been a year on since Banksy’s Great British Staycation. But what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in the last year?

When we discovered on the 10th August 2021 that it was officially Banksy that had created the ‘Great British Staycation’ our minds were in an excited and optimistic stance. Here in the UK we were finally coming out of a year of lockdowns and social restrictions were finally being lifted and it felt like ‘the good life’ was here to stay.

Learning to see things from a different perspective could be the greatest tool we have in coping with our lives and the problems we face.

However since then other political and economic problems have arisen in the last year as they always do. It does seem that in many senses we are going backwards and the current state of affairs can seem bleak. However is it all bad? Artists in particular are always looking to see things from a different perspective and looking forward at the ‘bigger picture’. History has taught me that we may as well try and make the best of a bad situation because historically one set of political and economic problems will only ever be displaced with new ones. Problems are inevitable, but how we choose to personally react to our problems can have either devastating or beneficial consequences for us.

On a personal level, if we can learn to appreciate the smaller joys in life - the ones that don’t cost much money at all - we can learn to find personal happiness and joy in a lifestyle that relies less and less on our income. In short we can learn to be happier with far fewer things and less need for money. Afterall studies backed by science show us that the things we need to be happy in life are often free or do not cost much money at all. But unfortunately our consumerist lifestyles don’t always allow us to see or practice this perspective.

There is an art form to living a happy life. We cannot control our problems but we can choose how we react to them.

To summarise, it’s been a year on since Banksy’s Great British Staycation. And Great Britain may not seem so great right now in light of the political and economic issues that have arisen. But something that can remain great is our mindset and the way we ‘choose’ to appreciate our lives inspite of the problems we face.

A quote that Abraham Lincoln was famed for, that perfectly summeraises the point is this: ‘folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be’ . Our political and economic problems are here to stay but perhaps many of us have learnt to adopt a happier and healthier mindset to live by since we were all forced to pause, reevaluate and gain a deeper sense of perspective of life itself during the lockdowns of 2020.

There are two sides to every coin, when things are taken away from us, we learn to appreciate what is left. These reflections of life come from my collection of artworks titled DREAMSCAPE.