Waters Rising: Perth Museum launches new flooding exhibition highlighting climate emergency

A new exhibition exploring the impact of flooding on local and worldwide communities has opened at Perth Museum.

Waters Rising will trace stories and objects connected to flooding from Scotland and abroad, from biblical accounts to Ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian and North American myths, as well as some closer to home.

It explores the growing threat of the global climate emergency and examines the impact of flooding and extreme weather events on communities, businesses, and infrastructure in Perth and Kinross.

Photos, memories, and oral histories from local residents are part of the exhibition.

Senior programming officer JP Reid told STV News: “I think it’s really important to ground these local stories and experiences and map them across the stories and experiences that people have all around the world and that people have had throughout history.

“It’s such a topical subject, look at the images coming from Spain.

“Flooding is devastating communities around the world and we want to draw threads between people’s experiences now and people around the rest of the world.”

For the last 200 years the rising levels of the River Tay have been well documented with major flooding events in 1990, 1993 and last year.

Members of the public have been invited to share how flooding has impacted them for the exhibition.

Curator Niamh Finlay hopes the exhibition will help make talking about climate change easier.

She said: “I feel like when people think about climate change sometimes you just don’t want to think about it because it’s too big of an issue, it feels too far away, it feel intangible.

“But when you put it in a context like this, where we’ve got paintings, taxidermy and natural specimens and placards and objects from all over the world and different time periods, it gives people the opportunity to explore the issue beyond headlines.”

The exhibition will open to the public on November 8 and will run until March next year.