PANDEMIC SOAP

On March 11, 2020 the world was thrown into ‘Pause’ with the WHO organization’s declaration of a worldwide pandemic. Inevitably the new work that I was to produce would contain the echoes and the scars of the pandemic. I decided that it was essential for me to create a work from which I myself “paused”. The first task that I chose to take a pause with was hand washing. I chose this task because for someone who suffers from OCD - to be warned to scrub their hands in a ritualistic way in order to protect themselves from the invisible enemy - it would be necessary to create a pause.

Pandemic Soap is an ongoing record of my hand washing throughout this pandemic that we are all enduring. Each day I deposit a wet bar of soap after hand washing onto a sheet of 4x5 photographic film. I continue this process for the duration of one day and then process the film rendering it archival as a record of time. This work is ongoing.