UNSW Galleries
After The Flood IIII (ongoing series), 2024–
mixed media

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.
Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

People of the Sand and Sea (Yoolooburrabee), the Quandamooka community have lived in Moreton Bay across the archipelago of islands including Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) for more than 25,000 years.

Disrupting concepts of time and geography, Quandamooka artist Megan Cope works over military maps that recall the myth of terra nullius. Her ongoing series After the Flood weaves social, geographical, and metaphysical stories, reclaiming landscapes with future tide lines of 5-metre sea-level rise, and replacing colonial titles with those of her people’s Jandai language. Each map, glowing with crystalline blue tides, returns cultural layers and memory over landmarks and places renewed with dual histories and a shared sense of place.

An act of decolonial cartography, at a time when entire lands and peoples across the earth are being reconfigured by climate change, with Quandamooka Country itself also vulnerable, Cope’s work is both a remembering of the past, a steadfast endurance of the apocalypse, a reimagining of ocean currents and future islands.