889

This work is titled 889, in reference to the 889 days since the rapid antigen test became available, up until the day this work was shown. It consists of 889 un-fired earthenware clay rapid test multiples, hand made by the artist over a period of weeks. 889 materialises time and contagion, two concepts heavily steeped in social meaning, but functionally invisible. It interrogates the experience of people with invisible disabilities, time blindness, and ruminates on how contagion entered the realm of social responsibility then, slowly disappeared. 

The height of the COVID pandemic was a source of collective trauma, and the collective response often feels like it has been to blur or block it from shared consciousness. This work attempts to place materiality on the time since the pandemics ‘end’, in the minds of people who are not vulnerable to it anymore. Ironically the rat test marked the beginning of a cultural shift away from social responsibility, once people were easily able to test, they began to return to their perceived normal, and a short period of time later, they stopped worrying about testing. This work attempts to put corporeality into the ongoing pandemic, draw attention to people with invisible disabilities and foreground people obscured and obfuscated by the ‘pandemic is over’ social narrative. The tests evoke small talismans,  tiny ghosts, or  charms for people for whom COVID never went away. Each test marks a day that the community has pushed disabled and chronically ill people further into unreality, and embraced forgetting their own collective trauma as well. Parallel to this, 889 reckons with ongoing psychological impacts from the initial event, the loss for many, of two years of their lives and the overwhelming silence, the only acceptable strategy being: ‘forget’. 

Jadzea Allen, 889, un-fired earthen wear clay, silk upholstery, 2024