40 Underwater Sculptures That Turn The Ocean Floor Into An Art Gallery While Helping Marine Life Thrive

Reclamation sees an angel with her back arched, her face and hands lifted towards the heavens as if in divine reverence. Her wings are formed of Gorgonian sea fans rescued from the seabed after storm damage.

In 1981 while driving in Geoffrey Bay on Magnetic Island, Professor Peter Harrison witnessed the phenomenon of what is now known as mass coral spawning and was the first to record the event. Professor Harrison has gone on to pioneer a world-first technique dubbed ‘coral IVF’, whereby millions of coral sperm and eggs are captured during coral spawning and left to form into larvae in floating pools on the reef. Once the larvae are ready to settle, they are released onto damaged areas of the reef to help them recover.

The generous surface areas made of non-toxic concrete is an ideal space for algae to grow on.

Beneath Canterbury’s historic Westgate Bridge, nestled into the shifting bed of the River Stour, Alluvia is part artwork, part environmental sentinel. Crafted from reclaimed glass fragments and marine-grade stainless steel, and embedded with subtle LED illumination, the work also incorporates environmental monitoring sensors and glows from within at night.

The work draws reference to Sir John Everett Millais’s celebrated painting Ophelia (1851-1852). A character from Shakespeare’s Hamlet which some scholars have suggested could have been inspired by a 16th century drowning which took place on the river stour in Canterbury. The title Alluvia refers to the alluvial deposits of sand (silica), linking the work’s material—glass, aderivative of silica—to the natural process of sediment left behind by the river’s rising and fallingwater levels.

The figure’s streamlined posture responds to the river’s flow, reflecting both its ceaseless movement and the invisible barrier of water—like an image or memory trapped behind a window. Over time, the river’s volume swells and recedes with the seasons, and nature begins to collaborate with the work, reeds clutch at its form and algae colonises its surface.

This slow transformation turns Alluvia into a living artwork—one that resists inertia and invites the viewer to reconsider permanence, presence, and perception. In this constant state of flux, we are reminded that memory, like the river, is never still—always refracting, reshaping, and often retreating just beyond reach.

Inertia depicts a life-size human figure sitting on a couch, absorbed in watching television, representing modern-day complacency and passive consumption. Surrounding objects emphasise detachment from environmental realities and the over reliance on comfort and convenience.

After 10 years underwater, it’s still standing strong.

Featuring 35 life size people walking towards a doorway in an underwater wall, it references the climate emergency and the window of opportunity we have to enact change before we reach a critical point of no return. The wall itself stretches 30 meters long, 4 meters high and contains a single rectangular doorway at its centre. It is intended to be a monument of absurdity, a dysfunctional barrier in the middle of a vast fluid three-dimensional space, which can be bypassed in any direction. It emphasises
that notions of ownership and territory are irrelevant to the natural world. In times of increasing patriotism and environmental destruction, the wall reminds us that we cannot segregate our oceans, air,
climate or wildlife as we do our land and possessions. We forget we are all an integral part of a living system at our peril.

Anthropocene is a cast of a VW Beetle with a mourning child on the windshield. The piece asks what we are leaving to future generations. The nine-tonne sculpture is also specially designed to create a habitat for crustaceans such as lobsters and its thick concrete walls prevent them from being extracted by local fisherman’s hooked barbs.

Professor John “Charlie” Veron is an acclaimed marine scientist who has dedicated his life to charting the world’s coral reefs and his known as the ‘Godfather of Coral’. He has discovered and described 20% of all coral species on the globe, and was awarded the Darwin Medal for his work on evolution. He was the first full-time researcher on the Great Barrier Reef, held the title of Chief Scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and he is currently working on the bold plan of collecting 400 species of coral from the Great Barrier Reef to preserve in a biobank.
Sculpture hybrid human, pectinia/brain coral form.