The flood is one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent narratives, appearing across cultures as both catastrophe and origin story. While grounded in real geological transformations at the end of the last Ice Age, its endurance lies in its symbolic force: a rupture that reshapes worlds, erases histories, and demands renewal.

This exhibition approaches the flood not as a singular event, but as an archetype. Across sculpture, painting and installation, the artists presented here draw on mythic forms, instinctive mark-making and material transformation to explore how images of upheaval persist beyond lived experience. Figures emerge and dissolve, surfaces fracture, and gestures repeat, suggesting a visual language shaped as much by inheritance as by observation.

Presented at Messums West, a site formed from ancient seabeds and embedded with fossilised marine life, the exhibition is grounded in a space that bears its own trace of submersion. Here, the flood is not only remembered or imagined, but materially present; a reminder that what is lost to time may still endure in form, image
and matter.