Since 21st March 2020, I have been taken out of my daily routine,I wake early at dawn with a feeling of despair. I photograph shapes in my home created by the unpredictable natural light that I have only been able to witness because of lockdown. The daily government press conference insists that the virus is under control, while at the same time we witness the fatalities in the UK escalating. We do not know names, faces or stories. Death is just numbers, statistical data. This dystopian year is hard to process, 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 news coverage, dominated by statistics, graphs and curves? A single death is a tragedy; thousands of avoidable deaths can’t be dismissed as a statistic. 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. The idea of translating the data into an artwork for me creates an emotional release that is intended to go beyond numbers and statistics.

Each panel (H1.14mXW1.34m) contains 24 photographs organised in 6 columns. Continuous red, white or blue and black thread is hovering over the panels, representing the corona virus fatalities in the UK for each day in a criss cross pattern.
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.

The total length of thread from 21st March 2020 to 9th April 2021 is 152431 cm (comprising 127040cm coloured and 25391cm black thread), hovering over 16 panels with 384 photographs ( H4.70mX W5.50m.
data from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk