Messums West presents FLOOD, a major group exhibition curated by OHSH Projects, bringing together painting, sculpture and installation to explore one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring stories. It endeavours to represent and help us to consider what survives when the world we know has been swept away. It is the understanding of the importance of recreation and survival.

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.

Sophia Olver and Henry Hussey, co-founders of OHSH Projects, said

“The FLOOD is one of humanity’s oldest shared stories. It speaks to our fear of losing the world as we know it, but also to the possibility of renewal: what remains, what resurfaces and what we choose to carry with us. At a moment shaped by ecological anxiety, conflict and a growing sense of instability, FLOOD asks why this ancient story continues to resonate so powerfully. Rather than presenting the FLOOD as a single historical or biblical event, the exhibition considers it as an archetype: a recurring image through which we attempt to understand rupture, loss, survival and transformation.”

FLOOD narratives appear across cultures and centuries. They tell of worlds submerged, histories erased and communities forced to begin again. At once a symbol of catastrophe and rejuvenation, the FLOOD has long given form to a profound human fear: that everything familiar can disappear, and that life must somehow continue in its aftermath.

The exhibition takes on particular significance at Messums West, a site formed from ancient seabeds and embedded with fossilised marine life. The landscape and architecture carry the material memory of a world once submerged, collapsing the distance between myth and geological history. 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 Here, the FLOOD is not only imagined: its traces are held within the ground itself. Johnny Messum, Founder of Messums West said “At Messums West, where the material of the site itself holds the memory of an ancient sea, that story of FLOOD feels particularly immediate.”

Across the exhibition, figures emerge and dissolve, surfaces fracture and materials appear eroded, excavated, burned or transformed. Drawing on mythology, archaeology, folklore, ecology and the subconscious, the participating artists create works that feel at once contemporary and ancient: objects salvaged from an unknown past or perhaps left behind for an uncertain future.

Artists in the exhibition include: Dale Adcock, Carl Anderson, Sol Bailey Barker, Dien Berziga, James Devereux, Laurence Edwards, Gus Farnes, Elisabeth Frink, Guy Haddon Grant, Nicola Hicks, Mark Jackson, Ben Jamie, Clementine Keith-Roach, Rosie McLachlan, Rory Menage, Jonathan Michael Ray, Miroslav Pomichal, Chantal Powell, Hannah Rowan, Tim Shaw RA, Becky Tucker, Carlos Zapata.

Moving between fragility and endurance, FLOOD considers what is carried forward when a world is lost: the stories, symbols and objects through which we remember, rebuild and make meaning from change.

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.