RED COAT

 

When the Covid pandemic locked us all indoors in mid-March 2020 most purveyors of cultural life were shut up, literally. Only the internet seemed to allow us to wander without apparent restriction. Everything was relegated to the flat rectangular world of digital screen images. The artists house Westwerk was no exception: all scheduled exhibitions and concerts were first put on hold and, when it became clear that this was no temporary stoppage, cancelled.

     Making use of the large window installed in its entrance gate, Westwerk started a series of solo shows which could be viewed from the street. The window series was called CORONAVISION and when I secured a ten-day slot in the schedule in April 2020 I selected a single photograph I'd taken in Tate Britain on my last trip to the UK just before Covid changed our lives. Not only was it now impossible to experience what the young woman can be seen doing in the picture, but it was also a classic motif of an image within an image within an image. The bust on the plinth at the centre of  my shot prompted me to ask my friend Swen Kaehlert, a very talented and versatile artist, to lend me his sculpture of a hand whose delicately beautiful membrane of disease seemed to perfectly echo the bust in the photograph.