Prior to lockdown, productivity took a broad range of shapes and tones. It was an everyday job, a course of schoolwork, group hobbies, taking care of family and friends. Our activities often involved other people, meaning human interaction was easily granted to us – and harder to avoid. Once our regular conception of productivity had been dismantled, a pressure was felt by many to emerge from quarantine with sprawling creative masterpieces. All the while, the energy required in maintaining contact with all of the people who used to be so effortlessly slotted into your day to day was significant and tiring, if not an entire production in itself.

The growing necessity to make direct daily contact with those who featured in our lives only weeks before brought forth new forms of communication to help us cope. We began to engage in zoom calls both formal and social, 5 million postcards were handed out to households around Ireland with free postage and people of all generations took to letter writing. Although postcards are private, they are seen by far more people than ever intended to – just as with the surveillance we take part in through applications like Facebook and Zoom. Using the postcard as an emblem of universality in communication and experience, ‘Epistolary To-Do List’ deals with a selection of messages sent and received through numerous different means of communication during the lockdown period. In the form of the postcard, these messages are indeed read by more than expected and encapsulate a moment of epistolary chore and communicative oddity.

Eva Comerford is a final year student of English Literature and History of Art and Architecture in Trinity College Dublin. As an artist, she specialises in drypoint and lino printing and has had work appear in Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, as well as the Dublin Art Book Fair. Her research looks at the relationship between art and the written word, particularly through the lens of publication, print and more specifically the art book.