The School: Lessons from the plague years

 

Because I often work with found materials and what could frankly only be called garbage, it's not unusual for friends to give me bits and pieces they think I could use. About two months ago a friend handed me a cotton covid mask they'd purchased from a museum, saying, "I thought you could do something with this."

Their donation reminded me I still had an entire drawer in my dining room I had cleared out at the start of the pandemic and then used only for Covid masks and gloves — before the science evolved and we learned that cotton masks aren't terribly effective while cotton gloves were worse than useless.

I dumped the drawer out on my table and studied it during idle moments for a week or so.

The covid stash

Once the "ah-ha" moment occurred I started to papier-mâché.

Papier-mâché fish

And fish by fish, the covid school emerged.

The final result, installed in a corner of my living room: