How Artists Stayed Creative During the Lockdown

Edmund de Waal, Barthélémy Toguo, Mary Mattingly and Jeffrey Gibson discuss how the coronavirus has changed their work.

When the U.K. went into quarantine on March 23, the artist Edmund de Waal had just opened “library of exile” at the British Museum—an installation featuring 2,000 books by exiled writers from Ovid to the present, along with his own works in porcelain. Since then, Mr. de Waal has been able to work in his studio in south London, but the assistants who usually keep it humming were quarantined in their homes, and a slate of pending projects was put on hold. It was the first time in 25 years, he said, that he’d been completely alone in the studio.

Mr. de Waal found that a new body of work emerged from the lockdown experience, sparked by an immersion in poetry. “I was thinking about all the poets who lived entirely as hermits,” he said, especially Han Shan, a Chinese poet associated with the Tang dynasty (619-907). Han Shan’s Cold Mountain verses are “beautiful, beautiful poems about what it is to be alone—to let the experiences of life just wash over you and keep going.” 

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