Floodlines

Floodlines transforms the ceramic commemorative plate into an archive of water. Sixteen earthenware plates mark the flood levels of Zeeland (1953), Banda Aceh (2004), New Orleans (2005) and Valencia (2024). Their four glaze colours draw on satellite imagery and historical press photographs, translating the water, soil and debris of each place into a sharp horizon between dry and submerged.

The work revisits the Dutch tradition of commemorative plates made after the North Sea flood of 1953. Stripped of their familiar illustrations and inscriptions, the plates retain only matter, colour and the level reached by the water: rough and dry above the line, saturated and reflective below it. Arranged in a precise grid, four disasters separated by continents and decades become a shared geography of vulnerability. A domestic object associated with eating and gathering turns into a quiet monument to the loss of home, and a warning that flooding is not only part of our history, but an increasingly urgent reality. Floodlines asks where the water will reach next, and how we might learn to live with it.

Year

2025

Material

Earthenware, four colours of glaze

Client

Watersnoodmuseum