Flood Story

Gerry Davies

In the future someone will scuba dive over your submerged house, they may even tentatively venture in to marvel at the baroque tangle of your snail encrusted living room, as they do classroom images of life before the Anthropocene with flood back.

This exhibition of new drawings takes speculative thinking about global warming and rising sea levels to extremes. The drawings, in liquid graphite, imagine environments so submerged, tangled and lost to us that they can only be visited by scuba divers. For us, today, inundation events on this scale are in the far future, yet when viewing these drawings the feeling is of looking back into history and a record of the past. Through this sense of a shift in time they suggest we, and the divers, have been transported forward in time to look back at the remains of our environmental folly.

The show takes place at Drawing Projects UK (DPUK) from 9th March to 1st April. DPUK is a centre for research, development and production of drawing. Programmes include exhibitions, projects, workshops and seminars that explore the role of drawing in creative practice today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated publication with a foreword by Professor Anita Taylor, Director of the Jerwood Drawing Prize and founder of DPUK, an introduction by Gerry Davies and a new essay by Professor Nigel Clark (LEC), scholar and writer on the Anthropocene, written in response to Davies’ drawings.

 

Flood Story: Final Visit, graphite and damar varnish on mylar, 2017