As the COVID-19 pandemic nears the three-year mark, artistic responses to its effects have begun to steadily trickle in. While Collateral Effects, a month-long exhibition at the North Wall Arts Centre that closes this Friday, references Coronavirus in multiple works, it also works hard to contextualize it within a long and chilling history of global pandemics - and the often inconsistent international response to them. ‘Collateral Effects’ refers to the social and scientific fallouts of the range of illnesses featured. The artist, Anna Dumitriu, works primarily in the emerging medium of BioArt: blending scientific components with more traditional materials. Dumitriu collaborated extensively with scientists to concretely conceptualise the abstract subjects of the pieces.
The lobby in the North Wall leads directly into the exhibition area - a high-ceilinged, white-walled space. This airiness played well with the pieces, which feel medieval in their muted tones and rich textures - a pastel quilt with its silk dyed with bacterial cultures (demonstrating antibiotic resistance), a vintage Christening gown embellished with lab-grown lace, and many more. Throughout, there is a delicateness to the detail that encourages leaning in.
‘Clean Linen’ uses an antique french nightgown, crisply white, as a canvas. On it, Dumitriu embroiders images of the bacteria that cause plague, scarlet fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria in matching white thread. The thread itself is impregnated with the DNA of these organisms - though this is not visible to the naked eye. The effect of the patterns is unsettling - almost pretty, but recognizably symbolic. The linen itself is a reference to the 17th-century wisdom that washing the body was not particularly important, but clean linen was essential to communicate good hygiene. With the surges of plagues and other infectious illnesses, demonstrating cleanliness became a huge social priority.
Not all the pieces feel apocalyptic in their messages. In ‘Bacterial Baptism’ the Christening gown, with lab-grown lace that looks forebodingly like black mould, actually references how babies develop their microbiomes, a process essential to building a working immune system.
Elsewhere, a highly sterilized and lightly chiselled animal bone (exploring the processes of bovine tuberculosis) is orbited by lichen-like wall sculptures, intricately modelled from 3D scans of yeast. The organisms, typically reviled for deteriorating artworks and antiques, are celebrated here as a unique and resilient life form.
A primary concern of ‘Collateral Effects’ is exploring the way diseases spread beyond borders. In ‘Souvenior’ a small purse is stitched with this word, believed to have been created by a convalescing soldier in Egypt during World War I. Dumitriu has further embroidered it with imagery of Vibrio cholerae - the oldest living strain of cholera, isolated back in 1916 from a British soldier in Alexandria - then impregnated the embroidery with extracted DNA.
In ‘Coming Back’, an antique wooden door is stencilled and carved to a texture resembling tuberculosis-eroded lungs. The title is auspicious, referencing both the feared resurgence of this deadly illness in England and the fact that the dominant strain circulating in India (the country most burdened by TB) originated with British and European colonisers.
Handicrafts and communal effort are also major themes, echoing the universality of health and sickness. Dozens of hand-embossed metal tokens, created as a group effort led by Dumitriu, are strung up in one corner, as secular talismans. In another piece, the hypnotic and unsettling ‘Shielding’, rows and rows of tiny beds fit for a doll’s house all sport uniform bedframes. The small felt blankets covering them, however, are artfully embroidered with their own small patterns and dyed using natural anti-inflammatories like turmeric. The piece highlights the burdens the COVID-19 pandemic placed on women, some of whom faced a regression of rights and freedom when their lives outside the home all but vanished. The piece blends traditional feminine crafts like needlework with 3D-printed bedframes modelled on those at the pop-up hospitals in Wuhan at the start of the outbreak, exploring the crushing claustrophobia of having nowhere to hide in a dangerous situation.
Elsewhere, there are poetic investigations into algae and living latex, clouds and snowflakes, and experimental sculptures exploring DNA structuring. Across the whole exhibit, there is an icy beauty, both in the way the pieces are rendered and the curiosity with which their subjects have been approached. Overflowing with insight and awe, this exhibition is well worth making time for.