Raft: Corrugated Sea

Collaboration with artist Stephen Copland

Charles Merewether, in his essay “Art and Social Commitment and an end to the City of Dreams” says a work of social commitment “seeks to express and provide an intelligible surface, a social knowledge, a truth to which one can appeal……….a moral and ethical order of humanity”.

The video “Corrugated Sea” raises questions about the 21st Diaspora and the notion of borders and attempts to provide an “intelligible surface” for debate.

The ocean opens its vast expanses to humans for plunder, safety, scientific exploration and a passage to new truths. The barrier to these truths is often are made constructs and is often fixed in the shifting sands of political manipulation in the 21st century.

Population and climate change will define these questions of how to construct a future global humane context for the mobility and fluidity inherent in these notions of homeland and the human right to live without fear.

Corrugated iron is a material which represents an impermanent and transient structure, affected by wind but resistant to rain and fire and ice. Referred to by indigenous people as “white man’s bark” scattered sheets represent a failed attempt to contain or colonize the land.

The iron barrier in the shape of French Romantic artist Gericualt’s Raft of Medusa shifts according to the political winds of change and as an opening occurs it is reversed as the global human movement request a decision on their future.

Are these borders able to be fixed?

1 Charles Merewether P9 1931-1948 Art and Social Commitment and an end to the City of Dreams Catalogue