I've been a siren exactly once. It was Halloween, I was a performer at a theme park (what can I say, I was in college), and the costume was a knockout: gorgeous from across the crowd, genuinely upsetting once you got close enough to see the work. Which, it turns out, is the whole job description.

The sirens of old were liars. They sang sailors toward the rocks, toward the wreck, toward the thing that would swallow them whole. Jason deCaires Taylor's newest siren does the opposite. She stands perfectly still in the shallows of the Solomon Sea, more in the open air than under it for now, and tells the truth, which turns out to be the harder thing to hear.

I've been following his work for years, long enough to have stood in front of more than one of his pieces and felt that particular vertigo of art you have to share with the sea. So when I tell you his newest one stopped me cold, take it from someone who doesn't startle easily. For more than 20 years, he's been lowering sculptures into the ocean and letting the ocean finish the job. Museums that become reefs. Statues that grow coral skin. Art you have to hold your breath to actually see. And if you've somehow never fallen down this particular rabbit hole, consider this your formal invitation.

His latest, The Solomon Siren, was installed this year in one of the most remote corners of the planet. And it comes with a story I haven't stopped thinking about.

Before you read another word, watch the short documentary on The Solomon Siren by clicking the YouTube link just below. It's under four minutes. Go on, I'll wait.

Back? Okay, here's what you're looking at.

The figure resting her head against that steel tree is modeled on Gladys Habu Bartlett, a Solomon Islands pharmacist turned climate advocate. Her grandparents' family once lived on Kale Island. Then the sea took it, over two decades, until the family relocated to the mainland, and the island stopped showing up on the map of anyone's actual life. Scientists declared Kale gone in 2016. Taylor's sculpture is its headstone.

And then there are the dates, which is the detail that got me. Inscribed into the figure and the tree is a small, devastating timeline. 2006, when the rising water first turned alarming. 2016, when scientists confirmed Kale and several neighbors were gone for good. 2026, the year the siren was installed, by which point Kale itself had been gone for more than a decade. Two more dates, 2036 and 2046, run ahead of us, marking where the water is projected to reach. The local sea has been climbing close to a centimeter a year, about three times the global average, and globally the rate has roughly doubled since satellites began measuring it in the early 1990s. The Solomon Islands, thanks to a cruel cocktail of ocean currents and geography, feel it first.

Here's the part I find quietly genius. Taylor usually sends his sculptures straight to the seafloor, underwater from day one. Not this one. The siren stands in the intertidal zone, mostly in open air, the tide climbing to about waist height only at its highest and then retreating to leave her in the sun. For now. Remember those forward dates? They aren't decoration. They're the waterline's schedule. The sea here keeps rising, and the siren is built to let it win, slowly, until she's as submerged as the island she mourns. You can, in other words, come watch her drown in real time. On purpose.

She's also built to be claimed in a gentler way. The base is pH-neutral cement, biochar and marine-grade steel, textured on purpose so that algae and coral and all the small invertebrate freeloaders of the reef will move in and never leave. The tree's a perch for seabirds. Give it time, and the memorial becomes the thing it mourns: a living reef, growing back what the water took. Loss and regeneration sharing one body. (Commissioned, for the record, by the British High Commission in Honiara, which is a very dignified institution to be funding something this poetic.)

I'll be honest with you. I came to this story for the art, because a luminous figure resting against a steel tree in the shallows is exactly the kind of beautiful, slightly haunted image I can't scroll past. But I've spent years around artists who do this particular thing: plant themselves in a landscape the rest of the world's busy forgetting, and flatly refuse to let it go quietly. So when I watched, it wasn’t the sea that stayed with me. It was the woman the sea displaced. And Gladys didn't just lose her island and grieve. She got loud. She's one of five young Solomon Islanders behind the campaign that made her country the first in the Pacific to scrap the tax on period products. In 2021, Queen Elizabeth II named her a Commonwealth Point of Light. The siren, it turns out, was always going to be modeled on someone who refused to go quietly.

So this weekend, do the small thing. Watch the doc. Look at what one island's disappearance looks like when an artist insists you can't look away. Then go check out the rest of Taylor's drowned galleries, the ones the sea claimed years ago, because once you've seen one, you'll want all of them.

The old sirens warned you off the rocks. This one's asking you to see the woman, not just the water. 

Weather.com Content Development Manager Joy Kigin chases the stories where weather, science, and culture meet everyday life. She's a stickler for getting the facts right and a sucker for making them land.