The Ruskin Collection: Comes the Flood

The Guild of St George’s Ruskin Collection celebrates the visionary ideas of the Victorian artist and writer, John Ruskin (1819-1900).

The gallery looks at how Ruskin established his collection in Sheffield to help people find inspiration in art and nature, and explores the relevance of his ideas today.

John Ruskin commissioned many works of art recording the architecture of Venice. He saw what was to come – that the city would soon be unrecognisable due to the impact of environmental change and poor building conservation.

This new collection redisplay imagines the future Ruskin predicted. The gallery labels and sound recordings have been written by creative writers, poets, and actors. These writers and performers re-imagine objects from Sheffield’s two major floods (1864 and 2007) and depictions of Venice as remnants from cities that have been destroyed by the rising waters of climate change. Together, they ask us to consider how we will remember the past after the flood has come, what will be lost, and what would we save?