Launch event: Thursday 14 October 2021 (open to the public)

Exhibition Dates: Friday 15 October – Saturday 13 November 2021

Apart/Together is an intense, disorienting, immersive multi-media installation comprising sculpture, sound, digitally projected animations as well as drawn, painted and printed works on paper. It deals with the impacts of COVID-19 on a macro and micro level – with confusion, death, loss, isolation, togetherness and the fragility of existence.

Its origin was an inadvertent recording of the first fatality of the outbreak in a visual journal which became a daily habit. Like the virus itself the project mutated into new variations: the toll became an AI translated soundscape, the journal pages, which all featured anonymous figures, became animated stop motion videos, the figures became large sculptural elements.

“The work is fueled by text and images from the incessant 24-hour news cycle and my experience as an English language teacher of students from migrant and refugee backgrounds where I saw, first-hand, the impacts on people as COVID-19 struck their countries across the globe. Together we deciphered information, pulled apart the mixed messages, misinformation and mistranslation, which in turn informs the ongoing project. Elsewhere the impacts of COVID have been profound and prolonged – some of us have felt guilt in our bubble but the spread of COVID has affected all of our lives” – Mark Buckland