No News Is Good News

I began this series of works in 2019 when a close family member was away from home and incommunicado for a period of time, and the phrase 'no news is good news' became a mantra for controlling the anxieties inherent in this situation (of course it is often a misnomer). I found I was focussing on all the means of communication that were normally available but now of no use to me: the ubiquitous mobile phone, the overlooked telegraph poles and their spreading webs of transmitting wires, the letters with no destination, even extending to the much more basic dots and dashes of morse code and the tin-can telephones of my childhood games.
A few short months later, with the onset of the pandemic, these things became all the more prescient. They became global. There were the newspapers themselves, they became problematic, full of fear and tragedy, and the consolidation of isolation and silence that overtook us all in one way or another. There was the dichotomy between insufficient communication between loved ones especially, and communication overload from the media. So my original mantra had been subverted and could now present an alternative, more unsettling reading of the phrase "no news is good news".