Since 21st March 2020, and like everybody else in the UK, I have been taken out of my daily routine. For the first weeks I woke up too early, before sunrise, with a constant feeling of dread and despair.
I saw moments of light and shadow in my home, something which usually happen when I am away at work. I set myself the challenge to photograph shapes created by the unpredictable natural light that
I have only been able to witness because of lockdown. I waited in silence for the light to illuminate the space and surfaces, paying attention to details. Each morning the sun highlighted new details in familiar surroundings. Later, the evening sun created shapes in different parts of the space.
Now it is 2021. The project has continued throughout the summer, into the second and third lockdown. It is now a year long project. The daily search for images in my home has developed into a ritual.
The project makes me reflect on the issues around permanence, how quickly everything changes and is gone. Thoughts about my own and my families’ mortality have not come in to focus so vividly before. Days in March to May 2020 were punctuated by TV updates, notably the government press conference every afternoon, part of the daily routine, shaping the narrative and insisting that the virus is under control. I asked myself how were we supposed to interpret the information while we witnessed the fatalities in the UK going up. We do not know names, faces or stories, only statistics. Is this the new normal? How do we encompass the emotional reality of the ongoing disaster? This dystopian spring and summer is hard to process. It has continued throughout the whole year. Now in January 2021 there is a feeling that we have become desensitised to mass death. Despite the high numbers of casualties it seems the covid victims are unable to generate a sense of national loss and tragedy as in times of war . Is that because of the date driven news coverage, dominated by statistics, graphs and curves? Or is it a survival instinct to function amidst adversity?

On the 12th August 2020 the UK public health organisation in England (PHE) changed the indicators for calculating the death rate, which is reflected in this project.
Each panel contains 28 images organised in 7 columns. Continuous red, white or blue and black thread is hovering over the panels, attached through push pins to each image representing the corona virus fatalities in the UK for each day in a criss cross pattern. The length of red, white and blue string reflects on the number of death with in 28 days of a positive test. The length of the black string represent the additional weekly numbers of death that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Winding the thread over the images on the panels in silence takes time and gives me space to think about the life of individuals beneath the surface of the numbers.
A Single Death is a Tragedy; thousands of avoidable deaths can’t be dismissed as a statistic and the shock of mass mortality can’t be covered up and down played. There needs to be a reflection on the reason the virus was allowed to take hold in the first place.

The total length of thread from 21st March 2020 to 30th October 2021 is 61 652 cm, comprising 46229cm red, white and blue thread and 15423cm black thread hovering over 8 panels with 224 photographs.
Each panel is 1.40 m wide and 1m high ( image size 20X25cm ) or 2.80 wide X 1.60 high ( image size 30X40) ( data from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk)