Using fashion model images of women from popular lifestyle magazines to create a series of Quarantine Collages produced within the lockdown period in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. 

The artist renders the selected model as a faceless mannequin, taking away their identity by replacing the entire skin area of the image with visuals of a variety of materials and foods such as hair, chocolate, plants, clothing, interior house plans, window blinds, toilet paper, stone, bubble wrap, household waste and laminate flooring. 

“These surfaces infiltrate the body (like a virus), replacing and destabilising the model’s identity, persona and vitality. As we are all now so much more aware and fearful of the once benign but protective environmental surfaces now potentially threatening our actual survival. These collages represent the mass shift in World perception of personal and environmental contact with dangerous yet invisible alternate life forms”. - Quote: G. Brooks

Simultaneously, the former fashion model takes on a new role: She becomes the protagonist of the artwork, the lead role in a film noir or a kind of doll with which the artist ‘dresses up’ and seems to ‘arrange’ in a playful and somewhat slightly disconcerting way. The mannequin or doll is used as a ‘readily available’ vehicle for the artist to mobilise her emotions and personal experience of the 12-week quarantine and lockdown period.

Attached are X8 selected collages from a series of 19 (titles listed below)

Summer Body (Hair)
Summer Body (Chocolate)
Striped Out
When Lockdown Ends
Going Shopping
Empty Pool
All the Clothes I won’t be Wearing this Season
Interior Plan
View from the Inside (Venetian Blinds)
All I Need (Apparently)
Venturing Out: Feeling a bit Laminate Flooring (Inside-Out / Outside-In)
Striped Out (Variation 2)
Still Crazy After All These Weeks
Bubble Wrap (Protection Infection)
Summer Body (Landfill)
Striped Out (Variation 3)
Woman Picking a Lemon (Lockdown- leaving a bitter taste in my mouth)
Going Out Grey
Striped Out (42,461+) Lockdown, Britain


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Lisa Fielding-Smith