Chauncey Flay - Seawall

The Art of Holding Back the Sea

By Dina Jezdić

Coral is not a rock. It is an animal most closely related to jellyfish, a colony, and a slow-moving architecture of survival. A reef is a city teeming with marine life, a breathing archive shaped over centuries by the quiet labour of polyps extracting calcium from seawater, building a collective shelter, cell by cell. And it is dying. Half of the world’s coral reefs have already vanished in the last thirty years. The rest are turning ghostly, breaking, dissolving in the heat of a warming ocean and the acid it now carries. When sea temperatures rise beyond the seasonal norm and stay high, corals enter a state of distress. They begin to expel the algae living inside them—tiny symbiotic organisms that give them colour and life. Stripped of this partnership, the coral turns pale, revealing the bone-white skeleton beneath. This is what we call bleaching. By 2050, scientists predict that up to ninety percent of reefs could be gone. With their disappearance, we lose more than biodiversity. We lose memory itself, the scaffolding of ecosystems, the underwater cathedrals that once turned the sea into sanctuary. What remains is rubble. Ghost forms in the wreckage of collapse.

In Rarotonga, coral has long shaped both the land and the sea. It forms the outer reef that buffers the island from storms, absorbing the ocean’s energy before it reaches shore. It nurtures marine life, sustains fisheries, and anchors livelihoods, offering food security and daily protection to the island’s people. And for generations, it has also served as a building material—quarried and burned to make lime, stacked into walls, churches, and roads. Coral is the architecture of life here, both above and below water. But now, the reef is under siege. The same material that once held the island together is being pushed beyond survival by climate change and unchecked development. Tourism swells, churning with dozens of tour groups chasing turtles. The reef, once a nursery for life, has become a theme park. Amid this tension, artist Chauncey Flay works with what remains, turning discarded coral into questions about memory, use, and loss.

In SEAWALL, coral becomes both archive and ruin, a material shaped by time and now shaped by human hands. These fragments are not harvested from the sea but gathered from what has already been cast aside—demolished buildings, upturned foundations, piles of rubble where coral, once used as material, now lies broken and forgotten. To look at one of his coral-flecked blocks is to witness time layered, geological, human, and industrial—all held in a single form. The coral is ancient, biological, and slow, pressed against the immediacy of polyfiller, mastic, and concrete—materials that are quick, synthetic, and disposable. This tension runs through each of the works, raising the question, is art making in this context a form of repairing, or simply recording the collapse? There is no illusion of restoration here, only a quiet reckoning with our urge to fix what we continue to break. The works make visible a simple and searing truth: nothing we build can hold back the sea.

Each work conforms to a modest uniform: 150mm x 100mm x 100mm, a fabricated block and a small monument to futility. The constraint is deliberate, almost monk-like in its discipline. The repetition echoes ideas rooted in time: acts of making that creates a product and a daily practice. What is a seawall, after all, but a desperate line in the sand? A line that will eventually be redrawn. The blocks in SEAWALL know this. They are self-aware, even if insufficient. The artist relies on their very useful declaration disguised as infrastructure in order to undermine that utility through transforming (or perhaps unmasking) them into art.

While the works carry a tenderness that belies their weight, they reveal the ghostly traces of long-vanished polyps, like X-rays of forgotten worlds. Through cutting, filling and polishing the coral surfaces, Flay introduces construction materials: fibre cement board, glass, concrete, and that strange contemporary alchemy of polyfiller and mastic. Each block becomes a negotiation between the organic and the industrial, a subtle parody of our attempts to engineer salvation.

Flay’s decision to present these blocks as souvenirs carries a subtle sting. A souvenir is a keepsake, a token of elsewhere and a fragment of place made portable. It marks an experience already slipping into the past. But souvenirs are also paradoxes: mass-produced emblems of singular encounters, tokens of authenticity sold in bulk. In SEAWALL, each block is handmade and unique yet offered for sale. They echo the reef itself: precious, endangered, and increasingly commodified. What we take home is not just a memory, but a reminder of how easily beauty becomes transaction, and how casually we consume what cannot be replaced.

The artist’s use of discarded sun loungers as plinths for the works deepens this critique. This gesture speaks to capitalism and climate collapse, but more powerfully, it repurposes what we discard. Broken remnants of tourism’s glossy promise repainted in teal colour is a nod to the old TEAL airline—the Coral Route and the corporation that sold us the fantasy of effortless escape. Reassembled into a wave-like wall, they shelve the coral blocks with unnerving grace. What is so compelling about SEAWALL is its iterative, obsessive, and at times absurd labour—assembling blocks out of dead reef and construction filler, as though by doing it a hundred times, the gesture might finally stick. In coral restoration, this is quite literally the method: small fragments of living coral are grown in underwater nurseries and then carefully reattached to dead reef in the hope they might take hold, survive, and slowly bring the skeleton back to life. It is a delicate, hopeful practice, but one whose scale pales against the enormity of the damage.

We are so often told we must save the world. But perhaps, first, we must learn how to grieve it. To sit with the losses already unfolding. Flay’s blocks are elegies to the lagoon we once swam in, the reef that has lost it’s colour and the species whose names we will never know. In a world where even grief can be aestheticized and extinction made palatable, these works resist that pull. They hold the beauty of coral but stripped of flourish. The artist’s response is with repetition. With blocks. With pieces small enough to hold, but too heavy to ignore.

And in the face of the ocean’s vast indifference, they remind us of something smaller, and more difficult: the moral weight of care. Because sometimes, the most radical act is not to fix or to save, but simply to stay with what is breaking. To notice the mess of it. To hold it in our hands and not look away.