The exhibition Flood Story takes speculative thinking about global warming and rising sea levels to extremes. This sequence of drawings by Gerry Davies imagine environments so submerged, tangled and lost to us that they can only be visited by scuba divers. The drawings are made in a silvery mix of graphite and varnish and depict interiors, villages, towns and cities, smashed and flooded. Banal 21st Century objects – clothes, iron, bicycle, cars, planes – are silted down to become future fossils and archaeology. 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. 

Gerry Davies is Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University and an artist who writes on drawing. He is ‘less interested in what drawing is and more interested in what it can do’. His work seeks to get a better understanding of how and where drawing today is engaging with subjects beyond the arts, in for example, science, medicine, and anthropology. This extends to his drawing practice, which has recently seen him drawing geology deep underground in Yorkshire and Australian caves. He has an extensive exhibition profile and has been a regular exhibitor in the Jerwood Drawing Prize and the predecessor annual open drawing exhibitions since the 1990s.

The exhibition is open from 10am to 4pm Thursday to Saturday. The exhibition catalogue is kindly supported by Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Art and Lancaster University and includes essays by Professor Nigel Clark of Lancaster Environment Centre at Lancaster University and Gerry Davies, the artist, with a foreword by Professor Anita Taylor, Director of Jerwood Drawing Prize and Executive Dean of Bath School of Art & Design at Bath Spa University. 

We are delighted that the exhibition has been listed in a-n's must see exhibitions of the week and in Interalia Magazine.

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