Locust Jones

Locust Jones
(printed by Sunshine Editions)

Plague parade 2020
lithograph; edition 1/3
Courtesy of the artist, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, and Bett Gallery, Hobart

Artist statement:

Cloaked in black with their faces hidden by bone-white masks of plague doctors or the dead, Venetians marked an historical scourge in an annual procession held under the shadow of the new coronavirus outbreak. The macabre march, which commemorates the plague that ravaged the city over four centuries ago went ahead ...

I found this reading France 24, published in 2020. Plague parade was made at the height of the pandemic and, like most works I make, the source of my information was world news. Extinct birds on the bottom left panel; powerful women like Nancy Pelosi; the nightmare ex-President in ICU; New Zealand’s native bird the Pukeko; the humble Penguin, Porcupine and Pangolin—the latter being the alleged source of the Coronavirus, suspected of being bitten by an infected bat and sold as meat in Wuhan, China.