Kate Murdoch
welcome (adj): gladly received, wanted, appreciated, popular, desirable, acceptable, accepted.
Sorting and moving things around in the studio is a constant and necessary part of my work. I need to create enough physical space to make room for installations, and frequently find myself shifting things around to get to materials that have become lost in an overfilled studio. This process often inspires new ideas but it also reunites me with old work, some of which is particularly pertinent and timely.
The WELCOME doormat, one of nine, is a case in point. I first bought them to create an installation on a beach in East Sussex in June 2019. I timed their installation to coincide with Refugee Week, an annual event, which was started in 1998 as a direct reaction to hostility in the media and society in general towards refugees and asylum seekers.
I wanted to make work that challenged that hostility, and the idea of using WELCOME doormats was motivated by a brief, chance encounter I had with a stranger a few months previously. In short, this person was someone whose opinion was at complete odds with my own; he did not approve of welcoming immigrants onto the Sussex coast, his narrative built around his fear of 'the immigrants taking over'. His work, health care, housing and so on, all being at risk as far as he was concerned.
I wrote a full account of my conversation in a post on my 'Keeping It Going' blog on a-n Artists Network at the time.
A few months after I'd installed the WELCOME mats, I was shocked to see Nigel Farage on the news, standing on the same stretch of beach. He'd filmed one of his anti-migrant videos there, during lockdown. How I wish I'd had the financial means to have been able to afford to leave the mats in situ!
The WELCOME mats took on a new significance when I unearthed them in the studio recently. Britain is currently suffering from a lack of available workers - for the hospitality, social care, construction, transport and manufacturing sectors, especially. People in the UK are seeing for themselves the problems caused by a shortage of labour - queues for petrol, empty supermarket shelves, gluts of rotten, unpicked fruit, to name a few. There's work that needs to be done, but not enough people to do it. Perhaps the positive contribution that immigrants make to our society is becoming more apparent to those who doubted it.
So, whether it's refugees fleeing for their lives, desperately seeking sanctuary, or people who simply want to come to the UK to take on work that needs doing, perhaps it's time to lay out those WELCOME mats once more.
Kate Murdoch, October 2021
