The new RSA Award – Pandemic: A personal response to COVID-19 was set up in response to the COVID-19 outbreak to assist artists with the creation of new work at this difficult time. I and seven other artists have been awarded funding to research, develop and produce new work which reflect personal responses to the lockdown.

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'My flatmates have all left. I'm a key worker in a supermarket. I'm alone. But I don't really know how to process or respond to these things yet. It is likely I shan't for a while. But the relationship we have to family, music, and the shape of our lives are all things that I feel, many of us have reconsidered or relied upon during this time. I certainly have.
A few weeks ago, I set my Dad the challenge of choosing his 8 Desert Island Discs for me. He then shared them with me over the phone as I walked around a deserted Edinburgh. It was one of the best things we have ever done together. At one point he cried so much he had to hang up and call me back. We travelled in time together. Through his life, and through the last sixty years, and suddenly I saw it all. He was at once the provincial, and the punk. The everyman, and the hero. So I would like to make a series of work each inspired by and named after some of his chosen songs. I hope they will form part of  a semi-imagined biography; a tribute, with the universal and the personal jostling together. A magical mystery tour. A Rake's Progress, with the figure of my Dad as he existed in my head during that conversation. An anonymous everyone, and my beloved hero, on a long and winding path through music, politics, culture and who knows what else, leading all the way up to now.  Wherever that is.'

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Follow the links below to view and read more about each work, or listen to the tracks that inspired them via Spotify or YouTube.

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