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.