Waterworld explores the uneasy intersection between environmental collapse, mythology, and human consequence.

Photographed within the mangrove systems, wetlands, shrimp farms, industrial estuaries, and polluted coastal zones of Malaysia and Thailand, the work attempts to construct a visual allegory of a world suspended somewhere between reality and dystopian fiction.

Within these tidal landscapes I became increasingly drawn to forms that appeared ancient, pagan, and almost otherworldly — tangled mangrove root systems resembling creatures or deities, plastic waste lodged within the organic environment like archaeological remnants of a dying civilisation, and waterways that seemed to exist outside of time altogether.

The series reflects upon the consequences of environmental degradation, rising ecological instability, and humanity’s increasingly fragile relationship with the natural world. Yet rather than functioning as straightforward documentation, the images attempt to operate psychologically — suggesting a flooded, lawless realm where the boundaries between nature, myth, and human failure begin to dissolve.

Central to the work is the tension between beauty and contamination. Between organic form and industrial intrusion. Between paradise and ruin.

The shrimp farming industry, coastal pollution, and the destruction of mangrove ecosystems remain important underlying realities within the project, but Waterworld ultimately seeks less to explain than to evoke — offering fragments from a world that feels both contemporary and post-civilisational at the same time.