Drawing from experience: visualising the impact of COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 and its series of lockdowns and social distancing presented challenges to individuals globally in a myriad of ways. During this time, individuals expressed their frustrations, displayed newly developed passions, and illustrated their experiences creatively, visually, and often through social media. Online posts of art created during quarantine provided insight into the ways in which people coped. The COVID-19 moment in history provided a unique opportunity to examine how individuals visualised their experiences of a globally shared phenomenon that impacted daily life. This study examines participant-generated drawings that were collected from June 2020 to October 2021 based on the question ‘How has COVID-19 impacted you’? Participants were recruited through Instagram posts and an email recruitment campaign. Thirty-two participants submitted photos of their drawings that illustrated their perceptions and experiences of COVID-19 including the disconnection, isolation, newfound resilience and even hope. Six content themes were identified including i) isolation and the isolated individual, ii) mental health and wellbeing, iii) COVID-19 depicted as a monster, iv) global disruptions preventing travel or seeing family and/or friends, v) hope for the future, and vi) social injustice. The drawings provided insight into the ways in which individuals use graphic representations to make sense of and communicate their experiences and understanding of a complex time. The findings suggest drawing was used as both a process for constructing knowledge about the impact of the pandemic, a product on which to reflect, and a strategy for sense-making.

Keywords:

• Drawing
• COVID-19
• sense-making
• visual literacy
• graphicacy
• visual methodology

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance of three undergraduate Research Assistants who worked remotely on this study: Kensho Ando Heng in recruiting study participants through an email campaign, and Hayam El-Asswad and Sally Fang in analyzing Instagram sites related to art and drawing expressions of COVID 19 that provided insight for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.