Through the spring and early summer 2020, Natalie Baird and Ariel Gordon painted and wrote separately and together, working through what it means to live in and through a pandemic.

Natalie and Ariel are both artists but they’re also sisters with two decades between them.

Pre-pandemic, they had a draw/write project where they sat at a table and pushed notebooks back and forth. Ariel wrote poems around Natalie’s illustrations. Natalie painted around Ariel’s verses. It was a way to connect as siblings and to collaborate across their disciplines. But once lockdown started, they had to modify their process.

And so, through the first four months of the pandemic, two boxes of paper moved between mailboxes, following social distancing protocols.

The result is Pandemic Papers Phase One. The unbound pages have been collected, printed on specially selected tactile paper, in a handmade folder, made of Canadian handmade artisan paper. Each book includes a saddle-stitched insert discussing the scope of the work.