Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents around the world—in particular mothers—have faced the conundrum of working from home while simultaneously providing comfort, care, and distraction for their children. The illusion that work is work and home is home, bred from decades of capitalism, seemed to dissipate. For many, the lockdowns over the past year have opened eyes to how interconnected our personal and professional lives really are, one multifaceted life that sometimes exists in a workplace, and sometimes at home.

Last year, Dr. Jennifer Willet, an artist, scientist, and mother of young twins, found herself at home faced with some unprecedented field work: parenting during a global pandemic.

Willet is best known for her research in the emerging field of BioArt. It plays upon the intersections between art and science through diverse approaches such as performance, installation, photography, and sculpture, often combined with social practice and scientific methods. In response to the undeniable blending of her research and responsibilities as a parent during the pandemic, Willet developed an interdisciplinary art project, COVID Suit, performed by her alter ego “COVID Suit Mom.”

COVID Suit is a performative series that involves Willet wearing a hazmat suit decorated with molecular patterns drawn from the COVID-19 virus and its variants, as well as reflective shapes and stickers that are chaotically layered on the suit. The suit represents the anxiety of attempting to protect oneself, and one’s children, from the invisible virus when leaving the home. In a series of performances, Willet moves through public spaces with her children, wearing the suit and navigating isolation and public health measures. While the series appears to be hyperbolic and even humorous at times, Willet grasps the panicked experience of not only parents but also caregivers, communities proven to be more vulnerable to the virus, and, quite frankly, the general public.

Willet’s COVID Suit series was commissioned by IOTA Institute (Halifax) and the INCUBATOR Art Lab (University of Windsor), and photo and video installations are under development to be exhibited in-person and online. In addition to the public performances, Willet has developed a series of DIY BioArt workshops, the first of which was presented online by Science Gallery Detroit and the University of Michigan in December 2020. In COVID Suit: Stay At Home Paper Laboratory Workshop, Willet guides participants through building and interacting with their own paper laboratory, based on the INCUBATOR Art Lab. In doing so, Willet further contextualizes her COVID Suit project and the reality of being isolated from her physical laboratory during the pandemic.

“This becomes sort of a metaphorical space where we can explore what a lab can look like, what can happen in a lab, who belongs there,” says Millet, referencing how building diorama houses with her children over recent months became an inspiration for the project. Developed with Willet’s research team at the University of Windsor, the printable maquette of the lab became a DIY micro-space for experiments and creative play with BioArt, an intersection of not only art and science but of home and work, together on a single stage.

COVID Suit is among many projects that have been adapted to respond to our diverse work environments over the past year. During the summer of 2020, Anna Leonowens Gallery approached Atlantic-based artists to describe their work spaces in relation to lockdowns and spending more time at home. Their IGTV series, Home Work: Lure of the Atlantic, illustrates the working-from-home experiences of several Atlantic-based artists, including PEI-based textile artist, Rilla Marshall.

Marshall’s life as a mother and an artist is apparent in the short feature as she provides a glimpse into her pandemic life, which is not unlike Willet’s. In a tour of her work in the group exhibition Creative Obsessions: A Look at Contemporary Craft in Prince Edward Island, at the Confederation Centre of the Arts (August 8, 2020 – January 3, 2021), Marshall references the influence of her daughter and of mothering in nearly every piece, from a direct collaboration of embroidering her daughter’s scribbles over the woven map-based background of Walking Nap to connecting to the shape of her baby carrier in Carrier. In her most recent work, Marshall shifts towards much smaller pieces, attributing the change to losing steam for the larger works with her young child at home. Rilla Marshall’s work is an honest response to her life, the restraints and joys, to being an artist and being a mother, and doing both fully and simultaneously. Like Willet, Marshall leans into the reality that art, work, and life simply don’t exist in silos. And if there is anything to learn from how the context of work has changed over the course of the pandemic, let it be that our work cannot exist in isolation from the life that surrounds and informs it.

Karen Stentaford has a long-standing preoccupation with place, geography, and belonging.

Often the nature of Stentaford’s work requires her to spend long periods of time alone, enveloped by the landscape she is photographing. In some images—particularly in her Island series—the solitude is visceral. However, this quietude is not to be coerced into an extension of the myth of the empty, expansive landscape. Stentaford is aware of the politics of her position as a photographer of settler ancestry connecting with the land, and the mirror in her lens does not betray this. In her series Trace, Stentaford channels her own childhood connections to place by revisiting her home of Topsail, Newfoundland, and photographing personally impactful sites. The images are haunting and beautiful. Perhaps even more than a physical geography, they are representative of a rich personal lore—the inner landscape.

But Karen Stentaford does not always work alone. She is an assistant professor at Mount Allison University, and the driving force behind the Photomatic Travelling Tintype Studio, which was originally conceptualized by Stentaford and Christie Lawrence in 2013. The mobile studio and darkroom has made appearances at some of Atlantic Canada’s buzziest art spaces, from New Brunswick’s Thunder and Lightning and Third Shift Festival to Lumière Arts Festival in Cape Breton. It is a high intensity social project, yielding dozens of tintype portraits of individuals from a single event, which become relics representative of the community itself.

Stentaford is dedicated to the alchemy of analogue media, particularly the wet plate collodion process, which proffers glass negatives and tintypes. In order to create an image, she must spend time being in a place, learning the conditions as well as understanding its geography. She processes the images in situ, in a mobile darkroom, which allows the atmospheric conditions of a place to contribute to the outcome of the image. If it is snowing, for example, the snow is not only captured through lens, light waves, and chemistry, it also appears through contact with the plate as it is removed from the camera and developed. Thus, the imprint of the landscape on the plate becomes poetically duplicitous. In instances where the external conditions making contact with the plate could be avoided, Stentaford chooses to embrace the meteorological collaboration.

Despite her attentiveness to landscape and sense of place, Stentaford has rarely set out to photograph New Brunswick, nor has she felt a particular attachment with its placehood until now.

For Stentaford, the isolation and closed borders of 2020-2021 became an unlikely catalyst for learning, as she began to recognize a deeper connection with the area near her New Brunswick home. Stentaford has made a ritual of walking, exploring, and documenting the coastal area around Sackville—particularly at the edges of the Tantramar River, near an aboiteau, and along the Fundy Coast to witness the tidal bore—and she has found solace in the energy of the place that feeds her sense of belonging.

Stentaford is engaging with her solitude, sense of place, and creative process in a new way. In lieu of travelling, she is revisiting the same area, spending time with the land and water. Observing the landscape—both its force and its calming energy—has given rise to new ways of working. Her methodology has grown to include her iPhone as a record keeper of her daily trips, as well as a combination of medium format silver gelatin and large format wet plate collodion processes. The imagery is tied to the lively tides and horizon line, especially, as the artist notes, when it “becomes emptied of details from the time of day and weather.” Where Stentaford’s other bodies of work, such as Island and Trace, are awash in the stillness, her newer work, while still in process, is teeming with life. Solitude is replaced with animated skies (evidence of varied species of coastal inhabitants) and the sound of water being obscured by the deafening wind as it gathers speed across the marshland. This work is a reminder of our vital entanglements with the world around us, which is both a silver lining and a lifeline. For Stentaford, the restrictions of the pandemic uncovered a kinship with the local geography, its more-than-human inhabitants, and the vital energy of place, to remind her that she never really works alone.

Trickster child Brandon Hoax, son of a Stonecoat mother and Dullahan father, summarizes their work using the following visual descriptors: being alone at a party, standing in a parking garage listening to the hum of a fluorescent bulb, and staying up late waiting for you to message me. Undoubtedly, aloneness is intricately woven into Hoax’s work, and it blends with the visual paradoxes they create. As a Haudenosaunee, Onyota’a:ka, and a Two-Spirit artist from London, Ontario and Oneida Nation of the Thames, Hoax explores brown queer Indigenous longing and desire. Currently residing in K’jipuktuk, their work navigates contradictions that incorporate themes of the sensual and the frightening, the severe and the tender, the desirable and the off-putting.

The concept of solitude is not alien to Hoax. When they were a teenager in the late 2000s, they participated in the early days of Tumblr, having three different blogs from their late teens into their early twenties wherein they explored their online self image and crafted a persona. For them, this persona relates to being unattainable and off-putting, a façade that is constructed based on Hoax’s visual interests. Those early blogs served to activate and fulfill Hoax’s want to control other users’ perception while also serving as a place for those interactions to occur. This type of dynamic is what led Hoax to be “Tumblr famous” for some time. Now all those blogs have been archived and are not available to the public, but Hoax continues this practice through other platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Hoax’s blogs have become mood boards that serve a similar purpose. They include images of body modifications (tongue splitting, scarification), facial tattoos, mud wrestling, fat men wearing jockstraps, and videogame characters, among other things.

In their essay Loneliness and Internet Use, professors Yair Amichai-Hamburger and Barry H. Schneider state that even when people use the internet to communicate and maintain relationships with others, navigating the internet is a solitary experience. In this study they present two opposing conclusions: internet usage does not alleviate loneliness in individuals and yet, when it comes to minority groups (disabled people, elderly people, racial minorities), it actually leads to “increased self-acceptance, enhanced self-esteem, and a further reduction of loneliness.” These oppositions are what Hoax uses to their advantage, as they share an inner world that is supposed to be personal while still managing to connect with others, fulfilling the internet paradox of being alone together.

By residing on the internet at such a young age, Hoax’s work draws parallels with early internet art, particularly Mouchette.org, 1996. On this interactive website, an anonymous artist posed as a thirteen-year-old girl living in Amsterdam. The website, which is still maintained by artist Martine Neddam, invited viewers to engage in what could be perceived as disturbing topics for a young girl. Hoax’s early internet presence is similar to Neddam’s, as they both can attract an audience and play with a fabricated character, which makes them alluring and intriguing. Hoax explains that creating a persona served as a defence mechanism that enabled them to meet and talk to people in the early years of their work; having the made-up self images meant that those interactions held low stakes for them. Even when this need for connection with others is present in online platforms, there is a clear boundary between Hoax’s internal and external worlds, as nothing personal is being disclosed. In these private worlds, Hoax is able to create meaningful experiences, generating discourses and ways of being that inform their current practice. There are clear parallels between Mouchette.org and Hoax’s art practice, as they both explore identity manipulation, playful interactions, sexually suggestive themes, and the line between severity and desire.

In their recent work, MOVEMARROW, made during a residency with Eyelevel artist-run centre, Hoax examines severity and desires by making harnesses out of ribbon, borrowing from accents found in pow wow regalia. The nine completed harnesses can be found in a digital exhibition hosted on Hoax’s website. As part of this project, Hoax made these custom harnesses as a present for members of their community of Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer artists. Once the harnesses leave Hoax’s possession, they belong entirely to the artists. The artists are invited to engage with the gifts by taking a selfie, making an art object, or performing, but there are no expectations for them to respond. In this work, Hoax invites desire in the form of fetish wear by having the harnesses displayed in a virtual white cube without anybody wearing them. This decision extends from Worn Inward, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia that toured to Yarmouth and Corner Brook, Newfoundland, in which Hoax made a harness for themselves that was wall-mounted to a frame. Fetish wear needs to be worn to be activated, and by being on display an aloneness is added to it. The harnesses not only create an opportunity to romance oneself but also generate a commitment between nations and territories.

Hoax’s work encompasses an “it’s a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found” sentiment, which stems from psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory. Through using captions like “call me horrible things, let me know you love me” and “you held my hand and I pulled away” in their illustrations on Instagram, Hoax offers a glimpse into the world they have created by following similar patterns as they did in their youth online. While doing this, they build on the paradoxes that they rely on to create meaning. What Hoax allows us to see is both seductive and lonely.