Gareth Fuller is a British artist well-known for his intricate drawings and map art of cities that he explores. Before he draws each masterpiece, he begins with research, which often involves extensive walks through alleyways, along highways, and via cultural landmarks and buildings. Sometimes, he walks for hundreds of miles!
The artist, based in Beijing, has grown accustomed to this routine, up until he was forced to self-quarantine for two weeks. On the evening of March 3rd, Fuller returned to the Chinese capital from Kuala Lumpur, only to discover that he was subject to 14 days of mandatory self-isolation under new rules imposed to stop the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Fuller said in a phone interview:
It was only natural for me to document my experience. I decided to map the four walls I was confined in and see where that took me creatively.
Every day, for two weeks, Fuller described his thoughts and experiences from inside his 590 sq. ft. apartment. The final result is a series of 14 detailed and humorous drawings titled “The Quarantine Maps.”
The artist spent his mornings in quarantine observing what was around him- news from the television or radio, his furniture, deadly updates on his computer, movements outside his window, and takeaways from long conversations with his wife, who was also self-isolating.
Late afternoons and nights were spent drawing in his sketchbook. Commenting on his experience, Fuller said,
You end up spending more time looking at the details, slowing back down, getting into the meat of certain subjects you wouldn’t usually have time to do. Your day is much more planned and less reactive
The first few maps focus on the apartment and simple thoughts. Eventually, he felt claustrophobic and spent several hours on the patio each day, looking out at the empty streets of Beijing. At one point, he unexpectedly got food poisoning and had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Some of the final pieces from the series imagines life in a fantasy setting- a village with a desert island surrounded by “a sea of sanitizer” and an “end of the world rave.”
Humor has always been a part of Fuller’s work. He felt it was not only natural but also necessary to keep that humor in mind when documenting his experience. Fuller explained that humor was his way to counter all the information he was consuming from the news updates, which only grew more concerning by the day.
Day 1 was very much like: ‘Look at this ironic situation I’ve found myself in.’ Towards the end, I had absorbed all the information I possibly could about the virus
This amazing artist is currently out of quarantine; however, his movements are limited by the need for social distancing. He aims to use the time to add to his series with additional maps about the pandemic.
