The prompt for this competition was “our time” I interpreted this as time passing in 2020. I’m pretty sure for everyone 2020 has not been the best year; starting from the pandemic.

In this watercolor piece i tried to represent isolation and a seemingly stopped time with the ice cubes. The first person is an essential medical worker, working on the frontlines. I wanted to show my thankfulness for frontline workers and other essential workers especially now! The second person is sitting in an empty metro, representing how empty all these once bustling places are now. Metros, town squares, downtowns, are now all filled with an unfamiliar sense of emptiness, loneliness, almost like a scene from a dystopian novel. The third person show the effect the pandemic has on mental health. Without being able to interact with our love ones or being able to see them in person, we can feel very lonely. Many times this can make us lose hope and lose motivation to work, or do anything, hence the girl sleeping at work.

The fire outside the ice shows both the irony of global warming and the state of 2020 itself. While the pandemic has made us feel as if time has come to a stop, as if we were in an ice age, simultaneously, global warming is just becoming a bigger and bigger issue. At the same time, 2020 in itself just feels like chaos, time feeling both slow and fast for some, represented by the flames engulfing everything else.

The clocks in the background represent different countries and how different countries have been handling the pandemic differently, either drawing out the pandemic or putting slowing it down which is why their times are all different.