Artist and paramedic, David Marron, uses the Asphodel plant to explore what it means to understand life and death for COVID victims.
Asphodels is an attempt to garner some understanding of life and death with COVID. It’s comprised of painting, drawing, a panel from a glass installation, and a film which combines related imagery with a poetic narrative.
Artist and paramedic, David Marron, uses the Asphodel plant to represent a COVID victim. The Asphodel meadows being a contradictorily depicted part of the Greek Underworld. Imagining a multitude of rooted Asphodels as the lost COVID faces within government statistics and the art a flawed effort to direct back to the shaken people. Effort is all we have.
The art strives to react against the brief time a paramedic spends with a patient and the sheer volume of people affected by the virus. It gives an imaginary face to the wave of patients crashing into hospital and those that break outside of it. In capturing these individual, fictional identities and isolating them upon canvas and paper there’s a necessity to comprehend the almost meaningless number of casualties from this pandemic. To give an identity back to a number lost amongst others.
The format of this exhibition presents the artwork first followed by the film, it's narrative and then an artist discussion, slideshow.
“taking with you the hearts of others”
reddish scops 2019-20
150x100cm. acrylic and charcoal on canvas
pallid scops 2019-20
150x100cm. acrylic and charcoal on canvas
“I’II take your memories and piss them away”
greenhouse 2020 onward
254x126cm. acrylic on dismantled greenhouse
“safe in our sickness”
“so here you stand
in the asphodel meadow
aggrieved and unlucky
makes me mad, mad and so very sad”
“it’s our nature to write off, isn’t it?”
asphodel 2020
150x100cm. acrylic and charcoal on canvas
cuccu 2019-20
150x100cm. acrylic and charcoal on canvas
“some didn’t notice the breeze”
shelley's eagle 2019-20
92x60cm. acrylic and charcoal on canvas
whiskered screech 2019-20
92x60cm acrylic and charcoal on canvas
omani 2021
61x122cm mixed media on board
barking 2021
61x122cm mixed media on board
“it’s just those that checked out had less miles on the clock than was right”