Dream or Nightmare?

Pandemic Series, Cast driftwood and objects in Jesmonite & bandages, 55 x 55 cm, £1950

This highly personal work explores my mixed identity as both observer and participant—medical practitioner and patient—living in social isolation during a COVID-19 lockdown. Just as I had to rebuild myself piece by piece, the sculpture evolved using repeated metaphorical objects that relate to the pandemic. Human femurs and driftwood are both vestigial remains and rendered to look like bone, morphing into one. Driftwood is symbolic of feeling beached and stranded. The contextual links reveal a hidden narrative. The doll-like faces represent feeling de-personalized by the experience of isolation, and the hands the inability to embrace. Bats, the vectors of COVID-19, invade the sculpture. The work is bound by clean bandages symbolic of both healing and hope for a post-pandemic world. The work also has a mixed identity that creates dissonance: although deliberately decorative, it reveals the darker aspects of the pandemic. The sum becomes something like a surreal optical puzzle, oscillating between dream and nightmare. 

The Pandemic Series is an autobiographical body of work created during the March-August 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown in the United Kingdom, and reflects my isolation as an immunocompromised artist and medically retired doctor. Only materials found in my own home were used in the creation.