Dobby and the Rest of Us, Distancing is a collaborative drawing made by ECU faculty member Lindsay McIntyre with her seven-year old daughter Alice. The artwork is presented on a billboard at Broadway and Prince Edward Street from October 15 - November 15, 2020, as part of Platforms 2020.

This text-based drawing, created during the pandemic, presents the artist’s stream of consciousness writing. The figures drawn by her daughter reflect on her own preoccupations with the pandemic and social distancing, as well as the character Dobby from the Harry Potter books.

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Dobby and the Rest of Us, Distancing is a text-based drawing that was created between April 13th and June 5th 2020. It is a collaboration that I made with my seven-year old daughter, Alice. The gift of the Covid pandemic is an opportunity to slow down and take the time required to think things through – to make considered works and to spend time with our thoughts in ways we don’t allow for normally. This drawing, which depicts individuals with and without masks on, standing on the landscape (a translation of the tundra outside Qamani’tuaq, NU, where my family is from), is constructed out of text and was drawn from left to right. The text begins in the upper right with the date and the number of covid cases worldwide at that moment in time. Its stream of consciousness writing covers my concerns, preoccupations and thoughts around the pandemic, which eventually and simultaneously becomes about the killing of George Floyd and concerns for the continued colonial erasures we enact on Indigenous communities, land and place. In the lower left, when the drawing was finished, the date and number of Covid cases appears again, thereby making the drawing a unique record of a place and time. The figures, drawn by my young daughter, also reflect her preoccupations during the pandemic. She has carefully planned out the spacing between people (with her best understanding of 2 metres), created a family that stands together in their bubble, and has outfitted several of the figures with masks. She was particularly obsessed with Harry Potter at the time, which is why Dobby, one of the characters in the book series, makes an appearance.

The artwork was commissioned by the City of Vancouver Public Art Program for Platforms 2020