Sunken Lands

Floods have been part of humanity’s story from its very beginnings. Across millennia, each time the waters rose, the climactic trauma left its mark on our ancestors, influencing religion, folklore, and culture across the world. But while floods lead to violent change, death, and extinction, they are also about renewal and rebirth as part of the ebb and flow of Earth’s natural cycles.

The places lost to the eternally shifting boundaries between water and land continue to have a powerful emotional resonance today. Their uncertain features emerge to haunt us, briefly, when the moon draws back the tide to reveal a spire or a tree stump. But, imbued with myths and warnings from the past, these underwater worlds can also teach us important lessons about the unavoidability of change, the necessity of harmonising with nature’s flux, and the folly of trying to control it.

Sunken Lands peels back the layers of silt, sea, and mythology to reveal what our submerged past can tell us about our imminent future as rising sea levels transform our planet once more.