Ane Thon | On Being Ill – A Covid-19 Diary

Ane Thon is a Graphic Designer and Artist living and working in Oslo. She owns a private letterpress studio where she explores the wondrous possibilities of experimental printing with moveable type. Ane has a particular interest in women in print, private presses, conceptual letterpress, and hybrid practices.

On Being Ill – A Covid-19 Diary, is Ane’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf ‘s essay On Being Ill. Letterpress printed one sentence a day from March 23rd to August 29th 2020, the work is a diary produced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Every day, for five months Ane went down to the letterpress studio in the basement of her home and typeset and printed one sentence from On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf. The original essay was typeset, printed, and published with Woolf’s own publishing house, The Hogarth Press, and is a reflection on illness and isolation, topics which Woolf knew only too well.

“I was obliged to follow though with the daily routine as I had promised to post a new sentence every day on social media, inviting others to take part in a very slow reading of the essay. Often – but not always – the sentence was followed by a short reflection, sometimes with references to research on pandemics as a topic in art and literature.”

The work was created out of Ane’s frustration and worries about the future. “The need to make something meaningful out of the situation beyond my control became strong” says the printmaker. In the early weeks of the corona crisis, Ane, like most, thought that the state of emergency would quickly be over, but soon came to realise that the normal state of affairs would not be returning for a while, and the timeline would not be as clean cut as we all wanted, with no liberation day marking the end of the crisis. Ane states; “Being in the middle of a pandemic, as we are now, with environmental threats and unruly leaders, it sometimes feels as if the reality we knew is disintegrating. Uncertainty about where we are going, what the narrative is, and what the future holds, gives us a different ability to relate to modernist experiments with texts that (to me at least) are utterly confusing, chaotic and surprising without clear narratives and directions; just like life at the moment”.

“We’re a year in now and I am still worried, and I am tired, but this too shall pass.”

@anethonknutsen

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