Take It On The Chin (2020)
Since 21st March like everybody else in the UK, I have been taken out of my daily routine: work home, home, work. I wake up too early, before sun rise with a constant feeling of dread and despair. I see moments of light and shadow in my home which only happen when I am usually away at work.
For the first weeks I have been waiting in silence for the light to illuminate the space and surfaces, paying attention to details. Each morning the angles of the sun highlight new details in the familiar surroundings. Later the evening sun creates shapes in different parts of the space.I photograph daily. Embracing these fleeting qualities makes me reflect on the issues around permanence, how quickly everything changes and is gone. Thoughts about my own and my families’ mortality had not come in to focus so vividly before. Days in lock down punctuated by TV updates. The government press conference every afternoon, part of the daily routine, shaping the narrative, insisting that the virus is under control. I ask myself how are we supposed to interpret the information while at the same time we witness the fatalities in the UK going up. We do not know names, faces or stories.Those among the death toll are only statistics, is this the new normal? How do we encompass the emotional reality of the ongoing disaster? The total unreality of this dystopian spring and now summer is hard to process.
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 downplayed.
There needs to be a reflection on the reason the virus was allowed to take hold in the first place.
Continuous red, white or blue thread is hovering over the image representing the corona virus fatalities in the UK for each day.
22nd March to 12th August 2020; 46418 cm red, white and blue thread, ( 2m high X 3.60m wide, 6 panels with 144 photographs )
For the first weeks I have been waiting in silence for the light to illuminate the space and surfaces, paying attention to details. Each morning the angles of the sun highlight new details in the familiar surroundings. Later the evening sun creates shapes in different parts of the space.I photograph daily. Embracing these fleeting qualities makes me reflect on the issues around permanence, how quickly everything changes and is gone. Thoughts about my own and my families’ mortality had not come in to focus so vividly before. Days in lock down punctuated by TV updates. The government press conference every afternoon, part of the daily routine, shaping the narrative, insisting that the virus is under control. I ask myself how are we supposed to interpret the information while at the same time we witness the fatalities in the UK going up. We do not know names, faces or stories.Those among the death toll are only statistics, is this the new normal? How do we encompass the emotional reality of the ongoing disaster? The total unreality of this dystopian spring and now summer is hard to process.
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 downplayed.
There needs to be a reflection on the reason the virus was allowed to take hold in the first place.
Continuous red, white or blue thread is hovering over the image representing the corona virus fatalities in the UK for each day.
22nd March to 12th August 2020; 46418 cm red, white and blue thread, ( 2m high X 3.60m wide, 6 panels with 144 photographs )
