The flood is one of humanity’s oldest stories, appearing across cultures as both catastrophe and origin. Again and again, one world is destroyed so that another can begin: the flood becomes at once rupture, purification and renewal. FLOOD takes this recurring structure not as a scene to be illustrated, but as an archetype through which to consider survival, transformation and what is carried forward.

Across sculpture, painting and installation, the exhibition brings together figures, vessels, guardians, relics and ritual objects that appear to have survived, resurfaced or been remade. Drawing on mythology, archaeology, psychology and inherited symbolic forms, the artists explore how bodies, materials and images can hold traces of what has happened to them — and how fragments of one world might become the foundations of another.

At Messums West, these ideas are embedded in the site itself. The 13th-century monastic barn has endured centuries of changing use and belief, while the landscape beneath it carries the memory of ancient seabeds. Protective marks carved into the building remain within its fabric, making the barn more than a setting for FLOOD: its own history of survival, ritual and change becomes part of the exhibition.