When I thought about making a book, my immediate attention went to covid. This long period of isolation, sickness and pandemic has been a long journey for me. I was in my second year of undergraduate when the pandemic started. Right before my final exams, the lockdown began, and I clearly remember telling my friends that this wouldn't last long and that we had to study for our exams because they would come soon enough. I was very much wrong. I actually did not give these exams for almost a year. My entire third and last year was online, and for almost two years I met no one except my mother and sister, stuck in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking streets that were usually jammed, but were now weirdly empty.
One of my professors passed away after being afflicted by covid twice. The day he was admitted to the hospital, we found out there was a fund for his treatment which was very expensive. All of the donated and shared the link as much as we could, but just that very evening, we got news of his passing. It was so sudden and so surprising that for a moment I questioned if someone was spreading a rumour. All I could think about was his oldest daughter, still in primary. His latest project in filmmaking has been short videos of her teaching English alphabets, and I recall all the proud posts he had made.
The last time I saw him was posthumous as we watched a video he had left for our graduation, right before his health took a turn for the worse. In the video, he told us to chase our dreams because he knew all of us were hard-headed, stubborn and tenacious bunch of kids who could take the world by storm.
Near the end of 2021, a friend of mine too passed away suddenly. She had been in a car accident earlier in the year and had been in and out of the hospital after having had her foot amputated. Due to complications, she passed away around November.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, I kept up with the news, that only seemed to get more and more distressing. And yet as I finished my undergraduate, I thought of what my friend would have liked, how she had been so excited to travel, to meet someone she had been falling in love with, to live vibrantly. I thought of the message my professor had given us, filled with pride and positivity. I decided to apply to universities for design. Having been rejected from one university for design for my undergraduate, I never applied to another. My journey to designing, and art, has always been rough and perhaps against the wishes of many.
Perhaps to say the book was about covid seems general and derivative, but the themes that make up covid for me, are also about a journey. A road that is very important to me, that I do not if I would have taken otherwise.
I wrote down themes that I associated with covid, and while six out of nine are negative, the three had held up the positive end are heavier than others, especially as the world recovers, healing, connection and touch are so valuable.
Themes:
Fear
Survival
Isolation
Connection
Distance
Healing
Touch
Contact
Death
I also wrote down how I could depict each subject, I struggled to represent some of the themes, so I left them out for the time being.
fear - use tracing paper to create layers.
Isolation - empty room, desolate and kind of creepy. Static
Distance - person on the left side leaning on a bed with phone in hand, layer two is a blue screen effect with tracing paper. Text message screen behind paper. Last layer another person leaning on bed behind the tracing paper layer.
Healing - girl painting the sky. Doting in a star. Last layer empty black, on top of that dark blue. Second layer dark blue with moon and stars that the girl is doting. Third layer closest to audience is her doting the star.
Touch - Oil painting or Acrylic Palette knife painting that you can touch and feel. Pictoplasma
death - something disquieting yet silent, calm yet unsual.
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