Stay Home Notice

When travelling to Singapore this year, I spent 14 days quarantined alone in a hotel room upon my arrival. This is a mandatory requirement for travellers to Singapore, also known as a Stay Home Notice, which can either be served at home or a designated facility depending on where you are travelling from. I remained in my room the entire time, except to take a COVID-19 test at the end of my stay. No physical human contact was allowed, and the corridor outside became a place of exchange, with meals and deliveries placed on a chair outside my door at regular intervals, and trash left on the floor to be disposed of. This is a record of my two weeks in isolation, which started as a means of occupying myself and adding a sense of structure to this time. Through drawing a floor plan of my room every evening, I established a way to mark the end of the day. These illustrations explore how anonymous spaces like hotel rooms can be turned into interim homes, instead of just places to sleep in while travelling. The drawings are repetitive, as were the two weeks; not so different from hotel rooms, which are repetitive spaces themselves. Small changes differentiate one day from another. They describe the experience of inhabiting a space solely through the objects within it.