A life-long atheist so marinaded in Christian iconography it oozes out of my pores … particularly when something hurts so much.
Mother and Child
Tag: migration
Shame
HMS Bulwark lives up to her name and turns her back on migrants dying in the Mediterranean … after all it was only a temporary assignment … until the public outcry had evaporated.
After all the ship was built to put marines ashore to kill people we don’t like. That’s what they do. Though like a school art show or poor inner city kids dancing at a civic opening it looks good plucking desperate people from the sea.
And the weird thing of living somewhere other than London, is that we know people serving on Bulwark and Ocean — they’re not just blocks on a map.
Mare Nostrum
Just added this to my Portfolio.
Been struggling with this image for a while. Wanted to use Géricault’s Raft of The Medusa because of its articulation of, and call to, public outrage, which seems horribly absent nearly 200 years later.
It strikes me that The Mediterranean is what binds us in Europe to Africa rather than a moat dividing us.
To turn our backs on fellow people in ultimate need is to turn our backs on our humanity.
I originally had an image from a dream — a hazy mist, a milky, flat sea with tiny reaching hands breaking the oily surface like a matt of seeweed, bobbing rather than waving.
It was too dead, too final.
Just the one strong hand, of one of Géricault’s survivors, still striving, reaching for the horizon and dawn’s rescue was much more powerful and direct.