Between September 2020 and July 2021, the covid pandemic and the implementation of Brexit left married Artists Désirée Coral and Killian Dunne stuck in two different countries: Coral, with the couple’s 3-year-old son in Ecuador, and Dunne in Scotland. Starting at either end of the book and eventually meeting in the middle, each artist documents and responds to their time spent apart in lockdown.
The book’s title Concurrently Simultaneously references 2 of the 733 words spoken by the character Lucky in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Within the non-space of the play’s set where time is confused, undefinable, and distorted, Lucky felt that he was trapped in a net. Within Concurrently Simultaneously both artists explore the covid lockdown net as a page grid system. Pages and narratives have no linear progression. Time is documented as a blur of moments within the physical and digital net. Moments trapped in time look towards a pinned date in the future, while the pages of both artists inevitably progress to the centre point of the book.
The artist book was later reimagined as a digital print wall installation where all time and visual responses could be viewed at once. In keeping with the two locations the book was created in, the wall installation was exhibited in both Quito, Ecuador and Dundee, Scotland. It was first exhibited in October 2021 at the Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial 21, held at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, Ecuador. It was then exhibited in February 2022 at the DJCAD Research Expo, held at the Matthew Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, Scotland. In April 2022 the wall installation and an interview which explored the creation of the work was featured as part of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Alumni online Showcase for EXPO Chicago.