In 1819 the young French artist Théodore Géricault exhibited his painting The Raft of the Medusa at the annual Paris Salon. The huge canvas measured 5m x 7m and had taken him eight months to complete. The figures on Gericault’s raft embody a gamut of human emotions from hope to despair, and the raft itself can be seen as a kind of stage on which this drama is played out. Once I began to think of the raft as a kind of theatre it was clear that it could become the setting for any number of little scenarios. I decided to limit these to fifteen, which is the number of survivors on the raft, and each miniature bears one of their names.