'This piece was inspired by lockdown as both a blissful solipsistic escape from normality at the same time as a sickly claustrophobic apocalyptic situation. I was reading Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch at the time, and the title is a stream of consciousness quote from the main character's time as a down and out artistic type in 1960s Paris. It seemed to express the dreaminess and latent brutality of the situation. The visual source for the painting was a re-photographed still from the plague film Twelve Monkeys. One of the characters is zipped into a protective suit to go out into the plague-ridden world and he has a moment of reverie in his cocooned space. My paintings aim to represent non-places which amplify the emotional charge of the figures inhabiting them.'

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- Lucy Cade