Two survivors J.B.Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard officially documented the events surrounding the shipwreck of the French Frigate Medusa, off the West African Coast in 1816. Savigny was a doctor and Correard a geographical engineer.  The latter drew up a plan of the raft to accompany his account for the official inquiry.

Gericault constructed a wooden replica of Correard’s plan 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 paintings I have constructed a wooden 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. As a container of hell on earth, it is the platform for continual 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.

New suggestions emerge through the composition. The raft becomes a vaulted ceiling, like a medieval vault of heaven. The space beneath is transformed into a separate world with its own light source and atmosphere.  With the raft as a vaulted ceiling the space beneath takes on more of a positive identity, an atmospheric quality of its own.

Steph Goodger M.A.  2006