Incantations to a Drowned Canyon explores anthropogenic warming, oceanic acidification and habitat loss of climate change while scrutinising the ways we cling to beach culture in the face of catastrophe. It examines how everyday people employ hope, faith, and belief to manage climate anxiety.

Incantations to a Drowned Canyon has its roots in endurance art. Off the coast of Western Australia is Perth Canyon, a vast underwater valley system. It is home to unique granite formations, extensive coral graveyards and is inhabited by a vast array of WA marine life who use the area as a breeding and feeding site. It is completely inaccessible to humans. Only remote viewing vessels can explore it. To understand Perth Canyon, Mitchell walked the length of it twice, in different seasons, via the beaches of Perth's Swan coastal plain twice, a walk that totalled more than one hundred kilometres. During these walks, Mitchell employed techniques of deep listening and walking meditations as a way of comprehending, sensing and conveying the unknowable.

Mitchell includes imagistic poems: of what the ocean washes ashore, mythic character studies of the people Mitchell encountered on their coastal walks, including fishermen, surfers, the widower who writes poems in the sand for his deceased wife, the mother who visits the ocean every morning to make sure it's still there, and a young witch who casts eco-magic to hold back climate change.

Incantations to a Drowned Canyon explores anthropogenic warming, oceanic acidification and habitat loss of climate change while scrutinising the ways we cling to beach culture in the face of catastrophe. It examines how everyday people employ hope, faith, and belief to manage climate anxiety, and giving voice to the vast submerged presence of Perth Canyon.