Life in the Time of Covid (2022)

Lockdown 2020 saw me return to painting after 15 years (more or less). The St Pancras / Arts Project commission was to respond to the theme, Life in the Age of Covid. I chose to extrapolate on the small paintings I made at the time of my 1 hour permissible walk. This and the painting I made as closure for the end of The Field art project (2008-2017) can be seen in recent experiments.

The image below is the walk I took in E2 and the way that nature took back London. The rest of the images across the walls of the gallery are other parts of London, denuded of people and traffic, and suddenly welcoming a wide range of non-human animals, imagined from above.

Like much of my recent artwork, the work is participatory and/or collaborative. There are 22 others’ views framed by my birds’ eye view landscape of London in lockdown. The work includes composer Rob Godman’s recording of the dawn chorus in lockdown Cambridgeshire.

Participants included professional artists, amateur artists, non-artists, service users, children, art students and others, highlighting the wide-ranging impact of lockdown on us all:
Leonie Abrahamson, Irene Akwuba, Jason Atmann, Lorenzo Belenguer, Rebecca Deary, Ann Froggatt, Julie Goodman, Marion Hack, Charlotte Harker, Peter Herbert, Shelagh McCarthy, Claire McDermott, Ignazio Miranda, Luke Morgan, David Napier, William Newbronner, Robyn Parker, Alexandre Santacruz, Jessica Scott, Lucinda Sieger, Nicholas Sweet-Rogers, Roxanne Williams, with the dawn chorus recorded by composer, Rob Godman.

Vimeo Video maker Anna Bowman responded to the Life in the Time of Covid with this film: