The Salon des Fables Director :
Artists of the Salon des Fables
The Raft is an exhibition with a specific theme; responses to the events on board the Raft of the Medusa, from the shipwreck of the Frigate Medusa in 1816, and responses to the painting Le Radeau de la Meduse, by Theodore Gericault, 1819, on the same subject.
McDermott’s writes about her beautifully delicate and detailed drawing Topiary Raft:
‘We stumble across the iconic scene of naval tragedy (from Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa) awkwardly rendered in topiary, nestling amongst other hedges in a vast formal garden.’
Rowe has taken over the Miniature Museum with, The Raft, fifteen miniature resin replications of Gericault’s raft. This is what he writes about it:
‘The figures on Gericault’s raft embody a whole gamut of human emotions from hope to despair, and the raft itself can be seen as a kind of stage on which this drama is played out. Once I began to think of the raft as a stage it was clear that it could become the setting for any number of little scenarios. I decided to limit these to fifteen, which is the number of survivors on the raft, and each miniature bears one of their names.’
Goodger writes about her enormous triptych The Underneath of the Raft:
‘Gericault constructed a wooden replica of a plan by Correard, a survivor of the event, for the making of his famous painting Le Radeau de la Meduse, 1819. His friends were employed as actors, playing their static roles on his wooden stage whilst he painted.
For The Underneath of the Raft triptych,I constructed awooden model to scale from Correard’s plan. Painting directly underneath it whilst it is suspended, I am literally in the space beneath the raft and can begin to imagine what that space, and the raft, could signify.
The raft is a heavy, free-floating mass, suspended in a sublime void, an uninhabitable region. It is a platform for unrelenting and immeasurable suffering. Awkward and fragile it sits right on the seam between life and death. With chaos of one sort above and another below, it is in fact a last semblance of order and control.
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