The Raft of the Brightonian, After Géricault, Brighton, UK, 6m x 1.5m, 2011–24

A vast digital montage set against Brighton’s East Pier, The Raft of the Brightonian draws direct influence from Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), recontextualising Romantic catastrophe within a contemporary frame of displacement, media saturation, and humanitarian crisis. Constructed over thirteen years, the work collages hundreds of photographs of refugees, protest banners, digital screenshots, news clippings, and art historical fragments. The pier becomes a scaffold for visual overload—crowds march, boats flounder, and fragments of text scream across the surface. It is both epic and intimate, ordered and chaotic.

This teeming visual sea captures the tension between survival and representation, between lived trauma and its media echo. As Ariella Azoulay writes, such an image acts as “an archive of potential history... assembled not as a completed past but as a claim for a different future” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 41). The work holds open a space of reckoning, fragmenting time and image into a montage of exile and endurance. Théodore Géricault’s own words haunt the piece: “I have to astonish, I have to disturb, I have to make people feel” (Géricault, 1983, p. 214). The Raft of the Brightonian embraces this imperative—an ethical call to witness and remember, in pixels and protest.

References:
Azoulay, A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso.
Géricault, quoted in Eitner, L. (1983). Géricault: His Life and Work. London: Orbis Publishing, p. 214.