'The work deals with connection, touch and time in relation to our experience of the pandemic and how society has been changed forever with mask wearing, social distancing and various restrictions on 'normal' life.

Isolation has affected everyone in different ways and 'Contagious Love' explores the lack of contact and tactile nature of expressing and feeling love, with your closest and dearest. Living through the isolation days is very much like existing in a blur, where you have lost track of time and feel disoriented. The piece explores a merge of abstraction and realism, in the medium of paint, where the texture and viscosity simulates the frustration and the physicality of missing human contact. A lot of people have been considering these Covid-19 times as reminiscent of war times, the unsettling overshadowing of something very ominous with an indefinite end date, this is expressed through the underlining darkness expressed with a fragility to the figures.'

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- Ella Shepard