MAPPING MIGRATION
Catherine’s artwork Mapping Migration Routes re-interprets the map of the London Underground, with a network of routes available to the UK’s population, depending on their legal status. Each route identifies a distinct legal status, and the capacity for movement – free or restricted – depends on the rights attached to their legal status. In this map, some of the intersecting routes indicate that legal status can change, potentially deteriorating to a lower status. This artwork has a strong personal meaning, following Catherine’s realisation that her status as landed citizen can be revoked and lead to deportation if found guilty of acts of protest.
Mapping Migration Routes developed from interviews at the Refugee Council and discussions regarding the capacity of physical movement assigned to each legal status, and the deterioration of rights, particularly for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. When her artwork was exhibited in the Transport for London’s pop-up Gallery, the exhibition’s visitors were invited to discuss their own personal citizenship journey. A wide diversity of testimonies were collected and presented as part of the exhibition.
Mapping Migration Routes
Hand Coloured Screenprint A2
Catherine Harrington©
EXHIBITION “Hidden in Plain Sight”
TfL Gallery, London during the last week of September, 2018.
This exhibition took place as part of the Art Licks Festival, which occurred in galleries across London during September 2018. The theme of the Festival was “Peripheries”.
An extract of the exhibition catalogue’s text:
“Participating artists of the group show “Hidden in Plain Sight “ explore multiple ways in which Wilderness can be a common space, found in the peripheries of culture and can creatively utilise the peripheries as a tool of empowerment…..
Inspired by the ideas of queer theorist JJ Halberstam, contributing artists investigate how non-normative identities, bodies, temporalities and geographies might extend from queer communities to other members of the “undercommons” – marginalised populations, conceptualised by mainstream society as the embodiment of wildness and as inhabitants of wilderness spaces”.