For many people, Google Street View is an imperfect tool used to pin-point exact locations, but for London-based New Zealander Jacqui Kenny, it’s an art form. It’s hard to believe the picturesque scenes on her Instagram account, The Agoraphobic Traveller (@streetview.portraits), are part of Google Maps and not snapshots from a series of enviable vacations. Sadly, Kenny tells SLEEK that she may never visit any of the places she’s honed in on Google, because she is agoraphobic.
“I started experiencing panic attacks in my early 20s. I’m 44 now, so it’s been a good 20+ year journey of… working to improve my mental health,” Kenny says. “I started to avoid most places outside of my comfort zone and was eventually diagnosed with agoraphobia.” This diagnosis combined with the stress of the failure of her media company at the start of 2016, prompted her to seek comfort. Oddly enough, Google Street View provided an outlet and she started taking screenshots of scenes that captured her imagination. “I loved discovering new places that I didn’t even know existed, and it was so much fun jumping from one country to another. I found myself searching endlessly for moments of magic frozen in time. They are very hard to find but they are there, you’ve just got to keep looking until you find one.”
It wasn’t long before she began curating her magic moments on The Agoraphobic Traveller. The images featured in her virtual gallery all adhere to a similar style, with geometric, pastel-coloured buildings set against sandy deserts and wide, clear dreamy blue skies. “Architecture can really give you a sense of a place and its history,” Kenny explains. “I like the connection and composition of a man-made structure and the natural environment it sits in.” Such buildings are often surrounded by soaring palm trees, cacti, and sometimes even, human and animals caught by Google’s camera. She cites the beauty of everyday-ness along with matching colours and dusty towns as key aspects of her signature aesthetic.
The cohesion and specificity of the images may lead you to believe that they were all taken in the same place, but they are in fact from a wide variety of countries, with Kenny’s favourite places to explore being Senegal, Mexico, Chile and Peru. “I’m trying to celebrate the similarities I find throughout the world,” confirms Kenny, “but of course also highlight the uniqueness of different places”.
Though Kenny was aware that her latest hobby may not sound like the best coping mechanism to the outside eye – “sitting at home for many hours a day doesn’t sound that healthy” – she insists that it is one of the best things she has ever done to improve her mental health. “Not only was I able to express myself creatively, it also gave me the opportunity to start openly talking about my agoraphobia,” she admits, going on to tell us that over the 3 years she has been working on the project, thousands of people have contacted her wanting to discuss their own struggles with similar anxieties. “I think it’s great when we face our fears together.”
And Kenny certainly faced her fears last October, when she travelled to New York for a solo exhibition of her work in SoHo (sponsored by Google of course). “We are still collaborating, which has been really great. They gave me permission to sell a selection of images with the profits going to a great mental health charity – The Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation.”
As more people fall for the artist’s work, there is pressure to show it to more people, but this again touches on the ambivalence of wanting to see the world, yet being afraid to leave the house. “I’m hoping to do more exhibitions,” Kenny tells us. “Something special in London would be nice.” I guess until then, we’ll just have to keep goggling at her globetrotting on the ‘gram.