From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
We speak of lakes and streams as ‘waterbodies’, but of course humans are waterbodies too. Water flows in and through us. Running, we are rivers. Seated, we are pools. Our brains and hearts are three-quarters water, our skin is two-thirds water; even our bones are watery. We were swimmers before we were walkers, slow-turning like freedivers in the dark flotation tank of the womb.
The first work I ever saw by the sculptor Laurence Edwards was afloat in a river. It was his Creek Men (2008) – a trio of eight-foot-high, heavy-set bronze giants, standing on an iron raft in a tidal creek near Snape Maltings in Suffolk. Hemlock, reed and fungus had been folded into the process of their casting, giving the figures the appearance of hybrid beings. Browned and brutal, they seemed to have risen from the river-mud itself. Everything about them was massy, marshy, muscular.
In the mid 2010s, Edwards’ work underwent a marked and sudden change – a phase-shift, really. In place of solidity, he began to experiment with porosity. In place of extrusion, depletion. In place of consolidation, dispersal. His bodies (he always and only sculpts bodies) started to dissolve. He would mould his figures in full in wax, then take a hot knife and – like a metaphysical surgeon – cut away triangles, rhomboids, flaps and scraps, until only a latticework was left. These new shapeshifting figures comprised more gaps than joins: bodies in the delicate, arduous process of shedding their skins, scattering into metal petals, being eroded and deliquesced. Things were freshly able to pass through these painstakingly hard-to-cast bronzes: light, air, sight.
Of the numerous dissolving bodies Edwards made in those years, it is his River Figure (2015) that has come to fascinate me most. At first glance its origin as human form is almost indiscernible. Is it a flurry of leaves? A flock of birds in flight? A blizzard of snowflakes? Then the eye returns some of what has been subtracted, and the ghost of a figure shimmers into view. It is at once reclining and levitating; head high, feet low; legs straight, arms to its sides. Is the skull angled up a little, as if the subject is curiously studying its own liquefaction?
In English, there is no verb ‘to river’. But what could be more of a verb than a river? Edwards’ figure has been rivered. It is a water-body, flowed through and flowing on, made of ripples and rapids and tongues of water. In my mind it exists on what is known as the ‘eddy-line’: the cusp in a river where current meets counter-current, causing a spinning motion in the water column that generates spirals and helixes, and which is ceaselessly forming and reforming itself.
Apophasis, in the theological tradition, is the practice of referring to divinities in terms of what they are not: definition by negation, the via negativa. I take River Figure to be an apophatic work. The ineffability it approaches concerns the ways in which – unmistakable to experience, near-impossible to articulate – we are continually weaving with and unwoven by world and time. We mistakenly imagine ourselves to be skin-sealed sovereign subjects standing dry-footed on the bank, when of course we are in fact always already afloat on the flow.
To my mind River Figure belongs to a mystical tradition of making that flourishes on the eddy-line of abstraction or abolition, and that joins artists as various as Thomas Merton, Saint John of the Cross, T.S. Eliot, Simone Weil and Patrick White. Viewing it, I thought of the beautiful moment in White’s complex novel Voss (1957), where Laura finds herself depleted to the point of diffusion by the indifference of the Australian desert: ‘the material part of myself became quite superfluous, while my understanding seemed to enter into wind, earth, the ocean beyond […] I was nowhere and everywhere at once. I was destroyed, yet living more intensely than actual sunlight.’
There is a brief, extraordinary river-moment in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written long poem in world literature. It happens after the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s dearest friend. Wracked by grief, Gilgamesh decides that Enkidu’s grave must be unique. So he orders the Euphrates to be dammed. Then he inters his friend’s body in the dried-up river bed – before ordering the dam to be struck down so that the river flows back over the grave-site. I sometimes imagine Edwards’ River Figure as a latter-day Enkidu, buried in earth and freed by water.
Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book, Is A River Alive?, is published this month by Hamish Hamilton.
From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.