A Story in four oil paintings
The Children of the Quarantine series was born out of a time of collective upheaval, when the world ground to a halt and humanity faced yet another existential reckoning. Now, five years later, as we approach the anniversary of the pandemic’s onset, its reverberations continue to unfold, in fractured systems, expediated and accelerated digitalisation, ongoing grief, and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
This anniversary feels pivotal not just because of the passage of time, but because it marks a point of reflection: on what was lost, what we learned, what was learned and so easily forgotten, and what has yet to be healed. In my view, the pandemic was more than a health crisis, it was a seismic shift in how we see ourselves, our interconnectedness, and the fragility of the systems we rely on. These themes are at the heart of the Children of the Quarantine series. this collection explores the intersection of meaninglessness, freedom, isolation, and death, drawing on the philosophy of existentialism to make sense of a world that often feels cruel, senseless, and beyond satire.
Sisyphus has always felt like my spirit animal.
In the original Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who defied the gods and cheated death twice, earning eternal punishment in the underworld:
pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down each time he neared the top, continuing this cycle for eternity.
Camus later reinterpreted this myth in The Myth of Sisyphus, using it as a metaphor for humanity’s struggle to find meaning in an absurd universe. He argued that, despite the apparent futility, there is defiance and even fulfilment in embracing the struggle itself, suggesting that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Camus, influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, introduced the philosophy of the absurd, embracing life’s inherent meaninglessness to create meaning through one’s own actions. For Camus, absurdity was the only logical response to an insane world. Absurdism still maintains it’s cultural and personal relativism, whether it be bananas duct taped to walls, or the cycle of self-doubt and procrastination many artists feel with the absurdity of creating art in a commodified, algorithm driven world, the tension between innovation and purpose.
In 2019, the recurring dream would not escape my mind: the faces of children, toddlers really, taken from a strange chocolate poster campaign from my childhood, merging, calling, screaming for help. Then, shades of nuclear red, distorted the colour palette, melted their little faces together. It swirled and swirled, like Hokusai’s wave.
This haunting image stayed with me, setting the stage for what would become Drone War Babies. Three children stare at the viewer, each representing a looming crisis: mental health, environmental disaster, and war. I finished the painting in January 2020, unaware of how prophetic it would feel just months later. It was my first attempt at oil painting in 2 decades.
MEANINGLESSNESS
The existentialist struggle with meaninglessness asks us to confront a world that often feels devoid of inherent purpose.
The full scale of political interference by social media monopolies had yet to be known. Fake news, deep fakes, were not yet as ubiquitous. Julian Assange had just been jailed for espionage due to his role in Wikileaks and the 45th American president had implemented a travel ban targeting several Muslim majority countries.
By February 2020, whispers of a virus in China and Italy had begun to trickle in. By the end of March, Sars COVID-19 shut down the world, with its impact on children still unclear.
The world descended into chaos. Yet, amid the noise, an online gallerist reached out, suggesting that Drone War Babies would make a great NFT.
ISOLATION
Art is not a solitary activity; it is a demand made on freedom and an offering to the freedom of others
(Sartre, 1952)
The NFT boom hit the mainstream, coming into the public eye with the
Christie’s sale of Beeple’s digital work/Non Fungible Token (NFT) 5,000 Days, which sold for 32,525 ETH, which was equivalent to $69.3 million at the time of sale.
Digital art has existed as a movement since the late 1960’s. Digital artists platforms like Deviant Art launched in 2000, but unlike the traditional art world, opportunities for selling such work were not possible. The concept of artists getting royalties from the sales of their work was a initially a key element of the NFT, provenance and royalites.
Despite precautions, by March, one family member was quarantined to the bedroom, then recovered. Soon after, the child fell ill, then recovered. Inevitably, I caught COVID and never fully recovered.
On good days, I could lie in bed and make art.
The isolation was eased by a community of artists I found in my phone, I listened into clubhouse rooms about NFT’s and the new digital wave. I wanted to speak, but couldn’t trust that my words wouldn’t be slurred, and I couldn’t keep a train of thought for then a few moments.
We bonded over the ideological concepts of digital revolution, reminiscent of the 90’s, but without the pills, 16 mm visuals, or dark sweaty basements. It felt like a unified, intersectional movement of artists, engineers and coders of all ages were coming together, for ideas around greater good, ideological decentralization and global artistic connections. Art backed campaigns to raise money for schools for girls, charity organization and it felt as though there was some light in all the political and medical darkness.
Yes, you can right click save and the art is yours, but the concept of blockchain integration gave it a time stamped transactional hash, a proof of purchase, from artist to buyer.
Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
What were the environmental impacts of these hundreds of thousands of transactions. We lived in a world that still relied on coal for energy, (in 2021 66% of the world relied on coal for electricity generation). I couldn’t wrap my head around the abstraction of spending a quarter of a million pounds on a jpeg.
That year, the UK faced death tolls comparable to the Battle of the Somme. Personally, I faced something I couldn’t yet name: long COVID. I struggled to breathe, couldn’t stand, I felt like I was on fire, alarms bells ringing 24/7 in my ears, all systems on high alert and shutting down. Moments of euphoria (later explained as cerebral hypoxia) alternated with never ending exhaustion (brain fog). My body was made of lead and fire, and my brain turned into the void.
I kept trying to find ways to make me better. In journal entries, I kept asking Why am I still sick? It was my 7th month of having a fever and the slow deterioration of functioning, all the medical people I spoke to just shrugged. I started to see neurologist and cardiologists, just to be told there was nothing wrong. One neurologist, with chipped superman cufflinks, suggested it was anxiety. I cried, a year I had waited, to be told it was all in my head. I couldn’t get my brain to tell my legs to walk. But the pathologization of women and the medical industry and situational mental health is a story for another time.
Days whiled away staring out the window, what mattered, if my life was to be cut short, what was most important to me? My child, and as selfish as it may sound, making art. It was the one thing that brought me great joy, I could escape in colour, it calmed my mind like previously only substances could (I got clean and sober October 2018).
By late 2021 I was able to get to my studio once a fortnight, I installed a camp bed, as I was still unable to stay awake for more than an hour at a time.
It all felt too surreal, here we were in a global pandemic, on the brink of environmental collapse, and such staggering amounts of wealth were going to some very strange and highly questionable people and places. This is years before the Covid inquiry, we watched the NHS on its knees in real time, with increasing lateral division.
I pixelated images of mass tire fires that were happening in Mexico. I used an image, of 3 children sheltering from the bombs in WWII at a school for the blind, with the eldest child hand’s replaced by a Cryptopunk. (The highest-selling CryptoPunk is punk #5822, which sold for $23 million on February 12, 2022.)
For all the futurist thinking (the future is now), concepts of community building, the ethical cracks at its height became canyons. There were contradictions in this digital utopianism, when it came to reality.
There were and still are amazing digital artists and communities pushing boundaries of space and time, creating vast landscapes of imaginative exploration, twisting the edges of art and meaning. A thriving scene for artists and musicians choosing not to be consumed by the large streaming platforms and maintaining their autonomy, launching their work on the blockchain via bitcoin mechanism, putting royalties back in the hand of artists.
I finished Cold War Crypto kids at the beginning in February 2022, two weeks before the war in Ukraine broke out. The crypto market crashed hard. We were not in fact all going to make it. (WAGMI)
At my lowest, I was sent away to rest. My family could see what I refused to: I had normalized my non-verbal state and improvised methods to navigate daily life, denying how ill I’d become.
DEATH
The U.K hand long hit death numbers beyond the battle of the Somme.
A giant outdoor mortuary was being built down the road, 334 acres of grass land, grieving relatives will not be allowed to visit. Schools were reopening, we gathered lateral flow tests. On our local community group, fights broke out between the dog walkers and the joggers, screaming about the MOUTH BREATHERS. There was such a righteous anger on both sides, the outbreak of puritanism vs righteous indignation and willful ignorance, slurs of covidiots, yes there were people whose lives were not impacted by covid, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Nurses were praised, then demonized. Conspiracy theories were everywhere, no one was telling the truth, possibly no one knew the truth. People were silenced, people were arrested, people began to protest.
I began to make costumes from the shards of the pandemic, Victorian inspired costumes from the brown loo rolls shells and the lateral flow tests.
Pandemic 3 was a response to the heightened division and awareness of mortality and morality during the pandemic. The fear of death and death of loved ones, isolation, and loss of freedoms, shaped collective and individual experiences.
We were being released from the ‘authoritarian’ lockdown. More than 28,000 people were fined and convicted of Covid rule breach in England and Wales. In our own part of East London, there were 100,000 new cases in the few blocks from our flat to kiddo’s school. In the U.K visiting dying loved ones was forbidden, funerals had to keep social distancing regulations and strict limits of mourners, all while our government licked cake off the taxpayer’s dirty poorly worn face masks.
In the U.S the death of George Floyd sparked riots, Elon Musk was up to no good, and the localized loss of lives and healthcare strain, with the WHO estimating a medium scenario of the death of 115,000 health workers by 2021 alone.
Pandemic 3 emerged from this confrontation with death. The child in the R number (infection rate) dunce hat, the dunce hat symbolizes society’s failure to manage the crisis (the “R number” becoming a mark of shame). It’s adorned with news headlines of the time, with the developmental impact of those lost years on normal socialisation is still making itself known.
The Victorian figure represents the moral puritanism that emerged during the pandemic, the righteous indignation of judgement, while the toilet paper dress and mask made of wedding veil highlight the absurdity of pandemic shortages and rituals.
The NHS child embodies the toll on healthcare workers, with the lateral flow pillbox hat, the PPE skirt, and evil-eye necklace symbolizing vigilance and protection amidst societal breakdowns.
Freedom and Responsibility
Art is not a solitary activity; it is a demand made on freedom and an offering to the freedom of others
(Sartre, 1963)
Freedom is central to existentialism, yet it comes with the weight of responsibility. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness reminds us that we are condemned to be free, and every choice shapes our world.
Struggling with long COVID and mobility loss, I found myself turning to digital tools like DALL-E and MidJourney, grappling with the role of AI in creativity. The NFT boom promised a new era of freedom for artists but raised profound ethical questions about environmental costs and the commodification of art.
When I started to come to, I no longer knew who I was. Why I lived where I lived, and why there were all these things expected of me. I was like a brain damaged Neo, seeing the matrix of patriarchy, capitalism, and technocracy everywhere. Everything I thought I knew about myself, and the world had been stripped back and dissolved.
It was a death of self, the self I used to be, one people said they missed, that person, was gone. So, I attempted to find meaning again.
Ai image generators were going mainstream. The lifetime works of many artists taken without consent to train their models.
People started to fight about AI.
What did it mean to be an artist in the age of A.I?
That had me stumped.
I loved the imperfections of AI, we shared the same issues with being unable to create realistic hands on a two dimensional scale. I asked it to recreate three of my paintings and morphed those outputs to create the fourth in the Children of the Quarantine series, themed around the Faustian pack. (An agreement in which a person sacrifices something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or their soul, in exchange for worldly or material benefits like knowledge, power, or riches.)
Faustian pact originates from the legend of Faust, a character in German folklore who makes a deal with the devil for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers, ultimately surrendering his soul.
With themes of futuristic isolation, environmental collapse, and life beyond the singularity, I imagined a future where the omniscient digital hive mind is lonely.
In the aftermath of a solar flare, fragments of psilocybin and human DNA collide with an asteroid, giving rise to a hybrid life form. A holographic machine boy, adrift in an empty universe, discovers an alien fungal baby. Carrying the memory of its sporehood, the baby recalls a world teeming with green, a vibrant ecosystem beyond the digital hue of #00FF00. Together, they form an unlikely bond, exploring survival, adaptation, and the echoes of humanity long after its decline.
“Fausty and the Alien Baby” embodies this tension, with the holographic boy and AI ALIEN fungal baby symbolizing humanity’s Faustian bargain with technology. The piece questions what it means to be an artist in the age of AI, where freedom to innovate collides with the responsibility to preserve humanity.
As a h/t to the AI, I attempted to paint, a nurse rabbit, in the style of Caravaggio. This painting did not answer my question of what it meant to be an artist in the age of AI, but it allowed me for the space to think about it.
For what is art, if not a means of expression? Or to give us time to think. A way to make sense of the world, no matter how chaotic or absurd it may seem.
Here we sit, as much of Europe veers toward right-wing politics, as human rights are in decline, the rights of women are eroded globally. With such an abundance of Western supported conflict.
Meanwhile, a handful of man-boys wield unchecked power over social media empires, and the United States prepares to unveil its foreign policy with uncertain consequences. The consolidation of power, wealth, and information rests in the hands of a select few, whose interests rarely align with the well-being of the planet or humanity.
So, how do we avoid existential despair?
Existentialism suggests we find meaning in the struggle. We take responsibility for our freedom, accept death as an inherent part of life, and embrace the reality of our isolation without losing sight of our resilience. In an age of atomization, we must remember that survival is possible, even in the face of absurdity. Or as my friend Stark says, we embrace the suck.
Health-wise, I’ve never fully recovered. I was one of the 70% who had a negative reaction to the AstraZeneca vaccine. While there have been small improvements, my brain fog has lessened, though age, the ‘90s’, and perimenopause may also play a role in my perceived cognitive decline, some things remain irrevocably changed. I still can’t stand or walk more than 100 meters without chest halting me, and pushing myself means days of being bedbound. My auditory processing never fully returned, making crowds and overlapping conversations overwhelming. Yet, despite it all, I am still here.
Even knowing that AI could replicate my life’s work in under five minutes, I still believe in art. Like a fool, I believe that creativity matters, that it holds the power to connect, challenge, and endure.
I admit, the world often feels on the brink of collapse, or too close to midnight. But I also believe in change. There are enough people who want something better, something kinder, more equitable, more sustainable. Whether through art, activism, or quiet acts of resistance, it is through these small, stubborn efforts that meaning is created.
So we keep going. We paint, we write, we resist, and we dream. Perhaps, like Sisyphus, we push our boulders with defiance. And maybe, just maybe, through collective resistance, we can shift the mountain itself.
Three of the works will feature in the upcoming EXI Show,
Curated by Evelyn J Marshall
EXI Show
February 19th - 23rd, 2025
Crypt Gallery
Dukes Road Entrance (off Euston Road), London, NW1 2BA
Tickets for PV
For more artist information and look at my years of work, please see www.cwstubbs.art
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