As Pandemic Pattern 4 is now completely finished, ready for photography, I now turn to the next in this series. For several months I’ve been wanting to make another work responding to the haunting images we first saw on our screens early in the pandemic. These are in front of us again. As I write, across the border in Brasil, the Manaus variant P.1, is ravaging the population of that country and bringing hospital system to the point of collapse in many areas. Again we’re seeing rows and rows of freshly dug graves in hurriedly cleared jungle or expropriated fields. Uruguay has a rather porous dry land border with Brasil, and with new case numbers rising alarmingly here, the government has just put into effect an emergency vaccinate-everyone program in the towns and cities along the border, hoping it will be strong enough to control the southward spread into this country.

I unexpectedly found some perfect fabric in my cupboard that I’d totally forgotten about. You could ask did I really forget it was there, or was it that when my mind was seriously focused on those rows of graves that I need to say something about, that this fabric leaped off the shelf and demanded to be used as the perfect background? Either way, I’ll need to be cutting several hundred grave shaped pieces of leather, and might even use the frog skins! It’s going to take me the rest of the afternoon to get enough to start. Well, there’s a pandemic on, anyway.