Every day we hear another announcement listing the number of deaths and infections caused by COVID-19 in the UK and around the world but by themselves the numbers don’t seem to mean anything, they don’t feel like they have any human connection.
Numbers are amazing tools and a world without numbers is unimaginable. Unfortunately we are so adept at using numbers that we no longer think about what they represent. Instinctively we understand small numbers but what does fifty or one hundred or one thousand or twenty thousand look like? What will one hundred thousand look like? Those numbers aren’t just abstract, each of those numbers represents somebody’s, mother, father, child, friend, lover, colleague.
This project is a way of visualising the numbers that get announced every day and to draw a figure to represent every person who has died in the UK and whose death is attributed to COVID-19. Each figure takes about as long to draw as it would take to walk up to somebody, shake their hand and say “Hello. Nice to meet you.”
The drawings in this project cover the first year of recorded deaths COVID-19 deaths ending on 13th March 2021.
Data sourced from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
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