When my grandparents died of Covid, I found a box of figurative, porcelain fragments in my grandad’s work-shed. Like serial killer trophies. I’ve made casts of these body chunks in wax, assembling them into ghoulish figures, crusted in copper and galvanised in resistance. The sculptures are arranged in the manner of a funeral procession. In tribute to those cursed victims of the pandemic who were unable to have a send-off of their own, and as a zombie protest march against the government policies that helped to kill them. Revenants brandish their death shrouds as banners aloft. Impressions inked in dirty oyster white, from shells that I gathered on Eastbourne beach at Grandad John’s cremation.
Beyond the recent plague dead, the 15th century allegory of the Danse Macabre looms a spectre, and the dancing frenzies of medieval Europe resurrect in bursting pustules of lumpen mass production, mass hysteria and critical mass. The dead denied are defiant, the humour malicious, my rage only partially purged.
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