Lockdown Rainbow (5 for the Government Art Collection)

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, Whitehall

Graham Fagen’s Lockdown Rainbows resonate with the rainbows, drawn and painted by children, and pasted onto the windows of many homes during the Covid-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns in 2020–1. These rainbows articulated public support for NHS workers. In this series of works, Fagan explores how to visualise the sensation of experiencing the body. His rainbows articulate through image, how his tongue experiences the touching of his teeth within his mouth. Fagan drew each tooth using his tongue, rather than eye, to delineate its shape. He then added in Indian ink and water, and surrendered control over the final outcome of these works, letting the water and Indian ink mingle at will. At a time when many in society were feeling out of control of their lives, Fagen felt drawn to the Rainbows he was seeing on the windows of houses around him, and the ideas of solidarity, hope and community that they represented in the face of the unprecedented levels of uncertainty of that time. These works with Indian ink and water, offered up a riposte to those rainbows, exploring ideas of complexity, while also, as the artists put it, offering ‘a form that shares our thoughts and feelings of a life locked down: the optimism, the doubt, the sunshine, the darkness…and the hope.

Graham Fagen (b. 1966, Glasgow) uses video, photography, sculpture and text to explore how personal and national identities are created and understood – and how they respond to their cultural contexts. Fagen, often referred to as one of the UK’s foremost contemporary artists, studied sculpture at the Glasgow School of Art, receiving his BFA in 1988 before going on to the Kent Institute of Art and Design to study Art and Architecture. He was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to represent Britain as official war artist for the conflict in Kosovo and has taught at various art colleges in the UK. Between 2017-19, his solo exhibition, ‘A Slave’s Lament’ a contemporary interpretation of the Scottish poet Robert Burns’s poem by that name travelled to galleries in the UK, Canada and the USA. The poem communicated the horrific realities of the transatlantic trafficking of people from Africa and made connections between the Caribbean and Scotland. Fagan represented Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 and his works are in various national collections in the UK.

Places

Subjects

rainbow, COVID-19 pandemic, coronavirus, national lockdown

Materials & Techniques

Ink drawing, indian ink, watercolour paper, Waterford 300g/m watercolour paper

Artist

Graham Fagen (1966 - )

Title

Lockdown Rainbow (5 for the Government Art Collection)

Date

2021

Medium

ink on paper

Dimensions

height: 38.0 cm; width: 28.5 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, March 2021

Inscription

verso: signed 'Graham Fagen Jan/feb 2021' / ‘Lockdown Rainbow 5 for the Government Art Collection'

Provenance

The artist; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection. 8 March 2021

GAC number

18892