In 2001, Ellen Gallagher began Watery Ecstatic; an ongoing series of watercolors that combines marine biology with an Afrofuturist mythology inspired by the Detroit techno duo Drexciya. It imagines a Black Atlantis inhabited by the descendants of pregnant west African women who were thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. The watercolor paintings fizz with bubble-like forms which, in Gallagher’s own improvisation on the mythology, have come to symbolize the lost future children of these drowned slaves. In 2008, she began Morphia, a series of double-sided paper works completed in 2012. At first sight, the series seem to interconnect in terms of seriality, materiality, and making, but diverge in content: the first involves a fantastical underwater ecosystem and the second involves Janus-faced heads that appear like resurfaced artifacts from a buried world. Yet they share the Black mythopoetic topoi of Gallagher's signature preoccupations wherein the oceanic creatures of Watery Ecstatic often sprout heads encrusted with briny matter and the two-sided heads of Morphia sometimes morph into watery zones teeming with subaquatic life.