David Marron | Asphodels | 11th March 2021
Meet the artist for the premier of his film; ‘Asphodels’ to accompany his online exhibition. Thursday 11th March from 7pm.
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 images themselves are expressive and stark. Their physical features undone by this silent viral infection attacking them, mirrored by the knife tearing into paint and charcoal. There is violence and there is care. Marron likens the virus to the cuckoo laying its parasitic egg in another’s nest, ready to hatch in another’s body with an unforeseen outcome. He often uses mythological references in his work as if to highlight the pretence of art within a disaster, but that maybe this pretence can lead out to something else.
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Asphodels online exhibition will be launched on the day of the above event.