Variations on a Quarantine (2020)

While under lockdown, I made an effort to channel my anxiety into small projects using the confines of my home and household objects.

For the series Covid Baby I scanned my five-year old's crayon drawings of the Covid-19 virus, which he was consistently drawing after seeing the image repeatedly on mainstream media. I created a digital pattern using his drawings and applied them to his baby clothes. Essential/Non-Essential address new terminology and associative language originating with the Covid-19 crisis.

In Retired Objects, I wrapped obsolete household objects with muslin strips, and carefully arranged them on hand-woven cloth, inside hand-built wooden boxes. I think of them each as exhausted objects, well-loved, imbued with touch, which served me or my family dutifully. The work poses questions about memory and objects, and how ordinary things become precious, and may even seem to exhibit human emotions in as they age and change over time.

In Ghost Fare I fabricated ordinary foods (bread and ground meat) from local sheep's wool, drawing a relationship between the scarcity of these items during lockdown, farming, and self-sufficient living.

Other photographs included here are home experiments and and exercises to occupy my anxious mind, using solely objects and the natural light from my domestic space while under quarantine.