Welded steel, 9 x 23 x 11, 2019.
The river god is one of the oldest reclining figures in sculpture: a male body laid along the ground, propped on an urn from which the river pours. Greek temple pediments put him in their corners, where the triangle narrows, and Roman sculptors gave him the Nile and the Tiber. The type is made of two things, a body and a vessel, joined by a stream. The sculpture is built of the same two: a long reclining mass of hollow tubes, and at one end a lipped vessel.
The blue and white surface joins them. It is the colour of water and the colour of china, so the whole figure reads as a vessel, with the river running through its tubes.
