Somerset Art Weeks 2018

Well it is now underway as of Saturday 15th September. There are 6 of us exhibiting in Batcombe at the Old School house so please come and visit us, we are there until the end of the month.

I have created ‘Extraordinary, Ordinary, People’ with the images I took whilst out in Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014/15 celebrating the front-line workers / healthcare workers during the Ebola crisis.

I have put together portraits with personal stories and articles. In the back ground there are 4 large cloths printed up in black and white illustrating the grim reality of their day to day lives. In the foreground, in colour, is a 1m/1m print of 100 portraits of everyone who worked in the ELWA 2 Ebola Treatment Unit, ETU, in Monrovia, from the security guard to surgeon Dr Jerry Brown who started the ETU. Included on this sheet are 3 people who also had full-page portraits published in Time Magazine in December 2014 ‘Person of the Year’, The Ebola Fighters, edition.

Alongside the portraits are images and text that personalise the sacrifices these amazing people and all the other amazing people who put themselves in danger to help their country and fellow citizen. They made huge personal sacrifices in extraordinary times, but I feel their story is being accidently drowned out by the western voice who are writing the history books, Wikipedia pages, news reports, and papers on the epidemic. These are the local people who made the ultimate sacrifice, they put themselves on the line, so many died or became infected and we are in danger of not acknowledging their heroism.