Covid Tales is a six minute video that tells the story of the pandemic on a woman, Wuon-Gean Ho, living alone in London. The prints that illustrate this video speak of humour and irony before lockdown even started: showing her travelling to and from Bristol on crowded buses and working with dangerous animals at the local veterinary clinic. Most of the covid prints were made in the strange months between spring and summer 2020. Once isolated, she experienced the freedom of working from the bathroom on the floor with no trousers on; attempted yoga with a mobile phone; carried her enforced isolation outdoors like a poisonous cloak; ate to excess and finally was completely engulfed by multiplying computer screens. The video ends with her re-entering the world as a vet with another dangerous but comical moment with a dog and its owner.
The prints, in order of appearance, are titled as follows:
0:05 We Tried
0:11 Double Caesar Sunday
0:16 Hamster Love
0:23 The Scream
0:29 Blue Table Porto
0:34 Greetings from CFPR
0:45 Needles of Ice
0:48 Right Here, Right Now
0:58 Poison Cloak
1:04 Long To Touch
1:13 Twenty Twenty
1:23 Horror Scroll
1:45 Covid Zoomin
1:52 Snip Snip Snip
2:05 Bracken House Garden
2:14 Zoom Gloom
2:26 Blue Mood
2:42 Dream Lunch
3:09 Send Help
3:19 I'm Doing Fine
3:30 Belly of the Kitchen
3:47 Gilded Cage
4:01 Death By Email
4:17 Screen Overload
4:30 Big Bum Yoga
4:35 Booom
4:43 Lockdown Chop
5:02 Two Metres
5:25 Pray to the Blossom
5:34 Orchid Baby
5:50 My Love!
6:11 Unfolding
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Covid Tales was awarded an honorable mention at the Biennial International de’Estampe Contemporaine de Trois Rivieres, Canada, in 2021; and was the grand winner of the Batsford Illustration Prize, Batsford Books, UK in 2022.