Drawing a community, together
Each one of us has been affected by the pandemic in a different way. And yet, it’s a global phenomenon. A shared experience. And so the effect has been felt in multiple ways: individual, local, national and global. We might feel fear or hope — or both. This is what Toronto’s Gallery 1313 had in mind when it put out a call, asking artists to send in their COVID-19 portraits to be part of an online exhibit.
Those portraits came in from all over the world. They ranged in medium, from paintings to collage to photography. They ranged in style. Some were self-portraits; some were of others — health-care workers, for example. So many that a first instalment was quickly followed by a second.
As each artist submitted, they described the image; described their inspiration. And so it became a collection of stories. One of those portraits came from Holly Edwards, an artist in Lakefield, Ont. She had to leave the studio where she usually paints to be at home with her two young children.
Under normal circumstances, each week she practises life drawing and so has amassed a lot of studies.
“Confronted with home-schooling and limited time,” she wrote, “my response was to cut up my paper studies and recycle my art in new ways.”
Her experiment with collage was born and this portrait of an unknown woman, titled “Confined,” is one of the results.
“This portrait is a journey into a new and exciting art direction for me, that would not have happened without being confined,” she wrote.
As a metaphor, it offers hope. We can create even in difficult circumstances. And in practice, being confined opened up her mind and her art. Edwards created a new person from the remnants of drawings of people she’d done before.
And so her art echoes the exhibition. Each individual story, seen together, creates a collage of experience, a collective portrait that captures the many ways we feel. It’s a project of hope and creation.
It reminds us that together we can create a new way forward.
The “COVID-19 Portrait Online Exhibition” is launching its third instalment and will run until the end of the summer. Go to Gallery 1313 at g1313.org to see all of the portraits.