Pandemic intervention in art: An ekphrastic account of the self in lockdown

The lived experiences of COVID-19 pandemic are reflected in many creative media practices. This article highlights how engaging with ekphrastic writing offers readers a means of approaching recent pandemic events through engagement with art, enabling creative reflection on lived experience through visual-verbal mediation. Treating ekphrasis as both a creative and interpretative practice, this article examines how linguistic strategies of ekphrastic intervention shape participants’ engagement with abstract art and how participants negotiate the resulting ekphrastic composition in light of their pandemic experiences. As part of the Writing and Reading the Pandemic project, this article examines two forms of response inspired by and connected to the pandemic: an ekphrastic poem written during lockdown and readers’ discussions of an ekphrastic composition in an online reading group. The data for the analysis consist of an ekphrastic poem ‘Self-Portrait in Quarantine’ by Alarie Tennille, which is written in response to Guillermo Wiedemann’s abstract painting Figure (1959) and published during the first wave of lockdowns in April 2020. Drawing on the model of ekphrastic intervention, we examine the conceptual relations established between the artwork and its poetic rendering, extending previous applications of the model beyond figurative art to abstraction. Reader-response data are then examined to explore how participants integrate and negotiate these cross-media relationships, and how engagement with ekphrastic covid poetry opens a pathway to deeper empathetic alignment and reflection on lived pandemic experiences of the self and the other.