Salt marsh is a peculiar intertidal landscape of mud and grass, existing half the time below water as tides rise and fall about it. Great pockets of salt marsh hunker on coastlines worldwide, often flat and dull, unloved and unwanted, blankets of mud that keep us from the distant sea. These sodden strips give some meagre pasture to sheep, or they’re drained and claimed for construction, or they’re abandoned to agricultural run-off and industrial spoil. Wastelands, edgelands – the lands between other lands.
With global salt marshes increasingly diminished by rising sea levels and land reclamation, this fluctuating, surprisingly fragile landscape has never been so under threat. How extraordinary, then, to embrace the salt marsh – to lie down in its silted trenches and dream – to explore its purpose and quiet mythologies with intelligence and grace – to reimagine what the marsh has been, and what it is now, and what it might become in a changing world.
Over the last three years, three artists have undertaken a relay-style residency at three European salt marshes, each spending many weeksat one of Barrow-in-Furness, Aberlady near Edinburgh or the vast Waddensea in the Netherlands – before rotating to the next. Initiated by Art Walk Projects, such sustained and collaborative enquiry has allowed Oscar van Heek, Linde Ex and Dana Olărescu – to reinvent these wastelands as places of worth and depth. Now showing at Art Gene in Barrow-in-Furness, Deluge is the multi-disciplinary exhibition of those journeys, suggesting traditions transformed, new mythologies and new migrations.
The work has been curated by Art Gene with huge sensitivity to the different media in play. Van Heek’s large-scale photographs – the biggest a staggering, otherworldly nine by three metres named ‘The Wastelands 1’ (2025) – capture the distinctive low profiles of salt marsh, high-contrast black and white casting the lips and hags into stark relief, with distant sea meeting clouds in shades of white and grey. Each of the photographs is absolutely alive with bubbles, made during the shoot with bubble machines – thousands and thousands of bubbles that drift and scatter, spheres of light like scales. They bring levity and playfulness and a magical, mystical quality to every image, asking the viewer to see the salt marsh with curiosity and wonder. But they also give physical form to the tons of sequestered carbon leached from the silt as marshes erode, suggesting a sadder, colder destination – for both the marshes and ourselves – to be underwater, marsh and man alike, claimed by rising seas while the last of our oxygen is parsed from our lungs. Van Heek drowns us in these moments, holding us beneath the surface, obliging us to connect the fate of the marshes to our own.
One of the triumphs of Deluge is the congruity of the different media, with a monochrome palette extended almost throughout; the blacks and whites of van Heek’s photographs climb into Linde Ex’s pencil and watercolour works. Collectively presented as ‘Land-Shapes’ (2025), each of these dozens of drawings explores an isolated fragment of salt marsh, together gathering a sort of gravity, a weight of numbers. Arranged in grids pinned to walls, the austere layout is a vision of drained and savaged land, the natural formations sublimated and partitioned wherever possible by agriculture – and yet each drawing is wraithlike and organic, the shapes conjuring ideas of human remains. Juxtaposing these natural images within such rigorous structure generates a tension between wildness and civilisation, calling to mind the contradictory nature of a zoo: nature sterilised. The same dynamic is seen in any part of the natural world that has been stripped and fenced and carved and steered in thrall to global consumption.
In the centre of the room is a conical shelter, a wigwam. Formed of bamboo and driftwood bones, dressed with pads of felt and spills of reeds harvested from salt marshes, ‘We All Fall Down!’ (2025) is one of several crafted pieces by Dana Olărescu. It is impossible to ignore the spectre of climate migration here – not only for peoples of the Southern Hemisphere, where rising tides are already claiming homes and lands, but for us in the UK too, where salt marsh plays a massive role in slowing the work of coastal erosion. The sea level rises projected over the next century will overtake the marsh and bring the waters to our door. And where then? One of the most striking images in the exhibition is also one of the few with colour: Olărescu’s bright pink bus stop poster ‘Adapt Or…’ (2025), showing a line of people knee-deep in the Waddensea, wading to a waiting boat. The message is stark.
The biggest problem for all and any art exploring climate collapse is the scale and trauma of the coming change. ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ as Eliot would have it; how to confront such catastrophe without becoming numb to it? How to make the crisis comprehensible? How, in other words, to find a thread of hope?
This is where Deluge becomes most interesting, for the exhibition explores the future as much as past and present. The artists are not doom-mongers heralding rising oceans, annihilations of people and creatures, the breakdown of the world we know – but of the life that evolves and rebuilds from there. The ‘slogan’ on Olărescu’s subversive bus stop advertising is ‘Salt Marsh Saviour’. Playing back on headphones, Linde Ex has written or collected poems and stories of both past and future salt marshes – from ‘Daughter Stream’ (2025) by Paula Biemans to ‘Mudflat Sjamaan Song’ (2025) by Koos Buist to ‘They Lived In The Shadows Of Stones And Seashells…’ (2025) by Ex herself, these audio works bring tropes of traditional storytelling to a world of mystical salt marshes yet to come, the vision cemented by the polyphony of voices in English, Dutch and Waddensea language.
From tradition comes direction. New mythologies, new art – new ways of understanding our world and ourselves. These are the themes that speak to me as a writer and a human, and in Deluge I recognise the incremental shift in culture from the individual to the collective. Building on her 2025 ‘walkshops’ with the public, Linde Ex has left a drawing station in one corner, with pencils and brushes and blocks of black pigment. Visitors are encouraged to sit with images of the marsh and take Ex’s lead in isolating single elements of the topography. By the time the exhibition closes there will be scores of pieces contributed by the public. Hundreds of drawings, each a facet of the bigger work; the work of many, but to a common cause, and so the work of one. Where are the solutions if not in collective action? Glance across the room and drown again in that extraordinary van Heek photo: thousands of bubbles, drifting out to sea.
Deluge is a eulogy – a form of collective grief, yes, and also a statement of intent. The artists make salt marsh urgent and vital and real. Not a wasteland, a badland, a void permitted existence only because it lacks value as real estate – but a thriving, visceral space to which we were once utterly connected, and could become so again in time. Reeds and dead rabbits, sea thrift and bones. Shingle like constellations. Plastic, of course. Castles, chimneys, stranded boats. Sea water spun into ribbons of light. There is science here, and utility too, salt marshes made essential in the fight against climate collapse. But there is also a wildness that speaks to the soul, abstract and unknowable. Stand on the threshold. See for yourself.
Deluge, Art Gene Gallery, Nan Tait Centre, Abbey Road, Barrow in Furness, Cumbria LA124 5TY. 4 – 28 March 2025. Open by appointment from 17th – 28th March. Call Art Gene to book 01229 825085 or email rachael.barker@art-gene.co.uk
Simon Sylvester is a writer and film editor working in Cumbria.
This review is supported by Art Gene.
Published 12.03.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,332 words
