The Disconnect, 2020
‘The Disconnect’ is a response to the Coronavirus pandemic in London, during the Spring of 2020.
It was a time of superlatives: the blossom on the trees was the most beautiful, the skies more blue - superficially things looked better than ever. However, in reality, it was a national, and global disaster on an immeasurable scale - a crisis like no ever in our lifetimes. The news was full of the language of despair and yet the view from my window was sublime.
I spent the lockdown in London, wavering between these extremes; with the exterior landscape at its most beautiful, but at odds with the largely concealed, catastrophic effects of Covid-19.
As an artist I wanted to subvert the visual landscape around me. The clusters of pink blossoms on the trees reminded me of the of the illustration of the microscopic Coronavirus; a pink mass of proteins, with a halo around the deadly virus.
The deserted streets, devoid of everything but the luminescence of these ‘deadly blooms’ formed the perfect backdrop for the project. Photographing the blossoms at night, with long exposures, gave them a ghostly apparel, that transformed the seemingly benign blooms, into a more menacing form – appropriate to this new alternate reality.
