SMALL BOATS & FAMILY MATTERS

2024

 

The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault famously depicts the survivors of a shipwreck, starving and adrift on a makeshift raft. Géricault astonished viewers at the time by painting, in harrowing detail, not an antique and noble subject, but instead a gruesome news event of the time.

Géricault’s radical painting, combined with online imagery of present day migration, is the inspiration for Cumbrian artist Rebecca Scott’s latest exhibition ‘Small Boats & Family Matters’ opening at Cross Lane Projects in Kendal next month.

In a group of work titled ‘Migrant Paintings’ Scott reworks images of journeys connected to immigration and displacement, overlaying them with emojis, representing a universal language of youth and freedom in modern online culture.

Conversations on immigration rarely focus on personal stories of real people leaving their homelands to survive and succeed: mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. Scott examines the human experience by juxtaposing paintings from her ‘Family Portraits’ series, showing a dialogue between different lives, lived in radically different circumstances, posing questions of empathy and emotional connection with family and strangers alike.

“I tend to work in series, and retrospectively can see a biographical aspect to my oeuvre; the topics I chose to respond to, have often been meaningful in a personal sense, playing out in reaction to the situations I have found myself in”.

Read accompanying interview with Rebecca Scott here >>

Photography by Rebecca Larkin.

Small Boats & Family Matters at Cross Lane Projects
Migrants, Emojis & The Smiley, triptych, 2022, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm each.
Capsized, triptych, 2024, oil on canvas, 188 x 224cm each.
Three Sisters & Son, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm.
Memorial Portraits, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm each.
The Raft of the Medusa, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm.
(left to right) Memorial Portraits, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm each: Three Sisters & Son, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm: The Raft of the Medusa, 2021, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm.
Emojis & Immigrants, triptych, 2022, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm each.
Small Boats & Family Matters at Cross Lane Projects
The Arrival, diptych, 2022, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cm each.
Family Portraits
(left to right) Splash, 2022, oil on canvas, 51 x 41cm: Anchor, 2022, oil on canvas, 51 x 41cm: Smiley, 2022, oil on canvas, 51 x 41cm: Dove, 2022, oil on canvas, 51 x 41cm: Migrants, 2022, oil on canvas, 51 x 41cm.
Small Boats & Family Matters at Cross Lane Projects