'Sheila Solomons Sydmar Calling' print by Robert Speker with Sydmar Lodge Care Home

Print 'Sheila Solomons Sydmar Calling' reconstruction album cover by Robert Speker, 2020. Produced with Sydmar Lodge Care Home residents and staff during the first Covid-19 Lockdown in the UK. Copying an album cover by the Clash, Sheila is shown full length in black and white, holding a walking stick in the air in front of a brick wall. Lettering in pink and green to left and bottom, and white above. Printed at the size of a standard LP record sleeve.

This set of 12 Care Home Album Covers attracted significant media attention in July 2020 after being tweeted by photographer Robert Speker. Working as Activities Coordinator at Sydmar Lodge Care Home, North London, Speker collaborated with residents and staff to recreate a series of famous album covers. In each case the figures in the album photographs are replaced by a care home individual, and the artist’s name or album title are replaced with the new sitter’s name or a reference to the care home.

This second photo in the series is a pastiche of The Clash's 1979 classic ‘London Calling’. Speker explains that, “Recreating this album felt even more relevant since my series of recreations are all works of pastiche, the practice of making art by intentionally imitating the style of someone else's work. I therefore wanted to use Sheila again with the same background I had used for the Elvis Presley recreation, again making use of Sheila's walking stick in place of The Clash's Paul Simonon's bass guitar. I just told Sheila to smash down her walking stick thinking of how she feels due to the Covid lockdown. I took five photos before Sheila was threatening to throttle me with her stick. One was actually enough as the first photo I took was the image that worked. Again, editing to black and white, the recreation was completed the same day.” Sheila’s pose as Elvis Presley is also in the SMG collection.

These first 12 album covers produced by Speker and care home contributors were developed into a charity calendar for the Alzheimer’s Society for 2021. Together they help to capture the particular experience of those living and working in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, which attracted wide media attention and public criticism for seeming to be ‘abandoned’ and for the extreme isolation imposed on residents, unable to see loved ones for many months. Equally, however, Speker’s joyful work demonstrates the creativity that flowered across society during the first lockdown, and the work by many artists to offer support – whether financial or emotional – to NHS staff, the wider public, and each other.