FELICITY MCCABE
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FIRST OF ENGLAND

“In September 2020 I began noticing an escalating rhetoric, repeatedly using emotive language such as ‘crisis’ and ‘invasion’ to inflame the debate around the English Channel crossings by migrants hoping to seek asylum here in the UK.

As a resident of Kent, these sleepy beaches which were now the stage for a bitter clash of opinions on where humanity and compassion should start and finish, were the same ones that I knew from sunny afternoon dog walks and family picnics.

I remembered seeing the painting “The Last of England” by Ford Maddox Brown, which uses a circular format to depict emigrants leaving the white cliffs of Dover, in the mid 1800s to start a new life in Australia. The painting details a small, vulnerable child’s hand peeking out from under a mother’s shawl and a string of cabbages looped around the edges of the tiny boat.

I began to comb the beaches named in the press reports, looking for evidence and also for fragments which might have borne silent witness to these families arrivals on our shores, the small children nestled under their parents coats, just like in the painting. I took my findings back into my studio and began to create structures which were vaguely reminiscent of sacred stone heaps I had visited in Mongolia. Often found in mountain passes, these shrines were built slowly over time by each passing traveller adding new rocks, twigs, and other offerings such as scraps of fabric or food and drink.

After creating each construction, it felt right to punctuate the complex set ups with simpler details of single items which instinctively felt like they held more information in connection with the individual stories of the travellers.” – FELICITY MCCABE