COVID: £20 Notes: A Screen-Printed Currency Intervention Marking the End of Lockdown

The Idea

This piece was made in December 2021, in response to the pandemic and the tentative sense of emergence from lockdown, illness and prolonged uncertainty that had defined the previous two years. I wanted to make something that held onto more than one feeling from that period, rather than settling on a single message.

Rather than a poster or a print on paper, I wanted the work to sit inside an existing system of value and exchange, so I used currency as the material. A screen-printed image on a real banknote carries a different weight to the same image on a blank sheet: the object already means something before anything is added to it.

A note gave me two faces to work with, and I used them to hold two different registers of the same year: one side about love, the other about endurance.

The Process

Each note in the edition was screen-printed directly onto real Bank of England £20 polymer notes, rather than onto reproductions, the currency used is genuine.

One side carries a hand-drawn heart and the word love, worked into the note’s existing design. In the space usually reserved for the Bank’s own signature, I added my own, signing the note “Jermyn” beside “Twenty”, using the printed signature block as an invitation rather than leaving it alone.

The reverse takes an image adapted from Gerrit van Honthorst’s painting of Saint Sebastian, screen-printed over the note’s existing engraving, with the year marked directly onto the note by hand as “#covid19”, a plain, contemporary date stamp on a centuries-old image.

Screen printing onto polymer notes behaves differently to printing onto paper, and there’s no correcting a misregistered print on a piece of real currency. That risk is part of what the material is doing, using something built to be handled carefully, and treating it exactly that way.

Reading the Work

Saint Sebastian has long stood for survival rather than sacrifice. Historically invoked as protection against plague, he is depicted wounded but alive, pierced by arrows without being killed by them. That distinction felt right for a year defined by illness without being defined only by loss.

The love side draws on something plainer: the collective care shown towards the NHS and key workers during the pandemic, alongside the personal experiences of love and connection that carried people through it. Placing that word on currency, something built for circulation and everyday exchange, asks a quiet question about what a society actually measures as valuable in a crisis.

The two sides don’t resolve into a single message. They sit next to each other the way the feelings did at the time, relief and endurance, tenderness and survival, printed on opposite faces of the same object.

Reception

This is a self-initiated piece rather than a commission, made and shared rather than staged. The edition has circulated online, through Instagram, rather than in a gallery, which suits a work that’s really about circulation and everyday systems of value.

It’s a small, quiet piece by design: a limited edition of real currency, put into the world rather than kept behind glass.