…to skate away on. So says the Joni Mitchell song, ‘River’. As a native Canadian Joni obviously thinks of rivers as frozen entities (and I love the idea of skating full pelt through a snowy wilderness, when I want to escape the world- my skating skills pushed aside for the moment!).
But I want to talk about rivers as flowing, moving, alive things. Sometimes the world keeps putting things in front of you, as if to gently let you know that you should be looking in a certain direction. All my readings, and viewings, and experiences recently have been putting rivers in front of me. So I guess I ought to take a look.
Recent inputs into my mind compost are Robert Mcfarlane’s BBC Sounds podcast ‘Is a River Alive?’ (a short version of his new book of the same title), Olivia Laing’s book ‘To The River’ (a journey along the River Ouse in Sussex with wonderful digressions on writing, art and life), and Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman’s new(ish) book, which uses the river as metaphor for time and our lives as a solo kayak trip along it.
The question, ‘Is a river alive?’ is a relevant one, given the recent granting of a charter, by Lewis and Eastbourne Council, to the River Ouse in Sussex, granting it 8 specific ‘rights’, including the right to be in it’s natural state and to flow freely. This follows on from the ‘Rights Of Rivers’ movement in South America, which sees several countries and regions granting rivers legal rights.
Rivers are rich in metaphor and what writer and artist Caroline Ross calls ’embodied practice’ as well as absolutely real and present experiences. Through rivers we can talk about flow, movement and change (you can’t stand in the same river twice). We can use them to talk about washing away and total presence in the moment. We can use them to talk about blockage, ‘stuck-ness’.
As an occasional meditation leader at my local group, I often start the session with a ‘settling image’ of a pebble slowly making it’s way to the stillness of the riverbed, allowing all the ‘stuff’ of the day to swirl around and past the mind as it makes it’s way down. I love this image of stillness and movement simultaneously within the mind and body. Both Oliver Burkeman and Peter Matthiessen (in The Snow Leopard) have written of rivers as time flowing- in Peter Matthiessen’s case, he catches himself trying to keep up with or overtake the river/time on his journey in the Himalayas, and suddenly has an epiphany that this is a pointless game. Oliver Burkeman’s marginally more comforting image is that of time passing under your kayak, whilst you wrestle with whatever comes your way as best you can. Either way, it’s impossible to see what’s coming round the corner, and so you stay present to ‘the next necessary thing’ that flows towards you.
Caroline Ross (in her excellent Substack newsletter) talks of her work unblocking a spring in Dorset as ’embodied practice’, and somehow being near or in rivers seems to unleash or unlock something inside (much like train journeys, when surrendered to properly).
‘My’ rivers are the chalk streams of Hampshire and Dorset (as introduced to me by my sister- historian, tour guide of Wessex and the person behind the instagram account @ericas_secret_wessex). These are exceptional rivers- so clear and cold. Filtered through West country chalk and running over flint riverbeds (80% of the worlds chalk streams are found in England- mainly in the South West).
And of course the ‘river’ that runs through Bristol, which is actually called ‘The New Cut’ and is exaggerated and augmented by man, having been deepened, straightened and widened by hundreds of navvies in the 19th Century. It’s tidal, and can be anything from a wide, placid, deep flow, so close to the bridges you feel you can touch it, to a trickle at the bottom of the stone walled corridor of silt and mud. Despite not being the prettiest of rivers, it is a corridor of green, nature and wildlife in the city (there are now many cormorants along it’s length, within the city). Even more local is the Malago in South Bristol, which alternately runs through and along nature reserves, meadows, retails parks, car parks, and underground. I once followed a kingfisher along a part of it on my way to my (then) studio. It’s importance as a corridor and path of wildlife has started to be re-recognised recently, with ‘greenways’ popping up alongside it.
That is another thing I love about rivers- they very often run through cities, providing flow and nature to city dwellers. I love standing on the bridges of London, with a sudden lifting of the face and heart, and a broadening of the view- they are my favourite places in the city.
I have made artwork previously around rivers and have found lovely flowing marks and colours to describe certain rivers, but I haven’t made a full artistic exploration of them (as you might have guessed, I can feel it coming on though…). I’m inspired by both Lewis Noble’s new body of work, currently showing at the Campden Gallery and to a certain extent Emma Stibbon’s current exhibition at The Burton in Bideford– though again this is more frozen, icy water than flowing.
Visually, the river is a wonderfully complex, nuanced and deep subject for art. So much potential for looking at and through surfaces, reflections, depths and seeing things from a riverbank eye view (ie low and close).
Keep your eyes peeled on social media and this website for work in progress and how I try to tackle this subject. I may not manage it, but I want to try and conjure the aliveness of rivers. In a very real way, they are our life blood, they make our world, lives, cities and imaginations alive, and in true symbiotic relationship with rivers, we can keep them alive too.
