Small Boats & Family Matters

Start: Wednesday 15 May, 2024

End: Friday 12 July, 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”.

Scott came to prominence in the late 1980s and is best known for her issue-based figurative paintings. Through her work, Scott re-examines public images of women, taking source images from glossy magazines and overwriting or ‘defacing’ these, with aim to expose the hypocrisies of a so-called sexual freedom.

Rebecca Scott (b.1960 Cumbria,UK) lives and works between London and Cumbria, and is the Co-Founder of Cross Lane Projects. Scott gained a BA in Fine Art (Painting) from Chelsea School of Art and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London. Scott has work in private and public collections nationally and internationally, and has exhibited in London, Cumbria, Spain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway. In 2019, she was a finalist for Cumbria Life’s Visual Artist of the Year award.