The Body of Water

Endlessly circulating, endlessly changing form and state

Article

No. 42 • July 2026

text: Nicole Ex

Water is not only water. It is a body: moving, remembering and returning. In Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1999), a photographic series tracing the surface of the river through shifting light, weather and reflection, artist Roni Horn writes of black water as something dark, reflective and unreadable – something that ‘bewitches, subdues,’ something alive enough to pull thought and time into its current. Looking at water, she suggests, is also looking inward. ‘When you see your reflection in water, do you recognise the water in you?’ The boundary between body and landscape begins to dissolve.

An oceanologist recently told me that a single drop of water takes a thousand years to return to its place. How this can be scientifically verified, I do not know, but as an image it feels undeniable. Water is ancient matter in perpetual transformation. There has always been the same amount of it on Earth: endlessly circulating, endlessly changing form. It appears as snow, mist, rain, river, sweat, tears. It freezes, evaporates, floods, disappears underground and returns again as a spring or waterfall.

In Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?, rivers emerge not merely as resources but as beings with rights, like the Whanganui River in Aotearoa – the Māori name for New Zealand – which has been granted legal personhood. Water becomes a subject rather than scenery. Other thinkers and makers arrive at similar insights: Indigenous water systems studied by Julia Watson in Lo—TEK Water: A Field Guide for TEKnology reveal centuries of reciprocal knowledge between humans and living waterscapes. Even contemporary experiments imagining water as responsive to vibration, sound or energy express the persistent desire to understand water as something sentient, impressionable, alive.

And our own bodies answer this intuition. The human body consists of roughly sixty percent water; we carry rivers within us. Our inner tides remain bound to the waters outside us. Perhaps that sense of reciprocity also explains the fluidity of Marlene Dumas’ watercolours. Diluted pigment spreads across thick paper before the brush intervenes, allowing water itself to determine contour, stain and atmosphere. The image seems to emerge from liquidity rather than being imposed upon it. In Ana Mendieta’s silhouettes dissolving into rivers and mud, the body does not disappear into nature but returns to it, becoming continuous with the landscape that shaped it. No water is separate from any other water, Horn writes. No body is separate either.

This article is from See All This 42 – The Body. View the portfolio here.