It Didn’t Have To Be This Way (California Pandemic Toll) is a large-scale installation of embroidered rolls of paper towels that visualizes the number of Californians who died during the pandemic. The intent of this installation is to communicate uncomfortable, yet important, statistics in a way that is more memorable, thought-provoking, and accessible than the usual bar or line graph.
Each stitched knot represents one person who died from COVID-19 in California. I used a stitch with a spherical shape because it is a perfect reference to the shape of a coronavirus virion.
Each paper towel sheet is one day of deaths. There is a tag in the lower right hand corner of each paper towel sheet with a date and the number of people who died from COVID-19 in California on that date. That is also how many stitches are on that sheet.
Each roll is one week of deaths. The rolls are mounted to the wall, with seven sheets hanging down, starting with Sunday at the bottom, going up to Saturday at the top. Weeks progress from left to right and the diameter of each roll decreases to show the passage of time. Each roll is 7 feet tall and 15 inches wide.
The installation consists of 115 paper towel rolls representing the statistics from the first California COVID-19 death in February 2020 to the end of the Omicron wave in May 2022. (Production is continuing and will end with rolls representing May 2023, which is when the Public Health Emergency was declared over.) The current installation size requires 150 linear feet of wall space, ideally in a room that allows all four walls to have rolls installed on them so the viewer will be surrounded by statistics.
See the project’s page on laraslab.com
