In this mini-series, I would like to share with you the objects collected as part of York Castle Museum’s Covid Collecting Project. In case you missed it, our Curator Helen Thornton has blogged about the aims of the project and how she developed it. I’m here to give you a tour of the objects we’ve collected, all of which have come into our collection following a public vote.  

 

ARTWORKS 

Creating art can be a powerful tool helping us face difficult situations. In the lockdowns of 2020, colourful hand-made rainbows and messages of support for the NHS appeared in windows all over the country, made by adults and children alike.  

We collected two pieces of window art, both of which were made by a local eleven-year-old boy, and displayed in the window of his family home in York. One is a collage of the word ‘hope’, using printed images, including rainbows and doves.  

The other is a paper chain shaped like children holding hands.  

The artist has written one thing he missed about school during lockdown on each of the paper children, including, ‘playing with my friends’ and ‘seeing my teachers’. He told us, ‘During the first lockdown, things felt really weird… I realised I was three different people – the person I am at school, the person I am with my friends, and the person I am at home. During lockdown, I could only be the person I was at home so it felt like lots of me was missing.’ 

Paper items like this can be hard to care for. They are very delicate, and they were not created to last. We’ve placed his artworks inside special archival plastic sleeves, so we can easily show them to people without damaging them.  

Our final artwork collected for the Covid Collecting Project is ‘Kelly’ by York-based artist Karen Winship. 

During the first lockdown in 2020, Karen was inspired to offer free portraits to NHS workers, after hearing about artist Thomas Croft’s project ‘Portraits for NHS Heroes’. She put a message on Facebook and was inundated with replies. In total, she painted 24 free portraits. Karen says ‘I found it emotionally draining, staring deep into the eyes of the photographs I was working from, knowing their plight. Many of the sitters got covid, some are now suffering long covid’. But it was also rewarding; ‘I had some wonderful feedback and I feel very proud that I have played a very small part in making people smile in this very challenging time.’  

Some of Karen’s portraits were displayed in York Art Gallery for the exhibition ‘Our Heroes’, and the originals were gifted to the sitters. She says that the paintings ‘act as a reminder that the NHS is made up of real people, with families, who have continued working, on the front line seeing the most awful things, through all this.’ 

The portrait that Karen has kindly given to York Castle Museum is of her daughter, Kelly, a senior occupational therapist. Kelly wears a surgical mask, eye protection and a plastic apron over her uniform, common items of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. Like many, Kelly was redeployed to help deal with the pandemic; she said, ‘We had to wear face masks, aprons, gloves and goggles for even non-covid patients to avoid the spread of covid. Patients could no longer see our faces when we treated them.’  Patients would have seen as much of Kelly’s face as we can in her portrait. She told us ‘Family were not allowed entry to visit their loved ones who were unwell, which was really tough’.  

The portrait of Kelly and the window decorations are now a permanent part of York Castle Museum’s collections and will help us talk about peoples’ experience of the pandemic in the years and decades to come. Did you create art during lockdown, or in response to Covid-19? Share a photo of your artworks with us on social media using the hashtag #lockdownart or please feel free to comment in the box below.