A river folded like pleated cloth, layered waves of pale water stacked under a round glass dome on a wooden base, one crest still curling mid-fold.

No. VI · Permanent collection

A Folded River

Material: Impossible
Provenance: Donated by a cartographer who needed the valley for something else.
Condition: Certain of itself

Still flowing, neatly, in place.

The river was folded in the field, the way one folds a bedsheet: banks aligned, current pleated, the cold kept in. Under the dome it continues to flow, politely, from one crease into the next. Unfolded, it would run for ninety kilometres and remember every stone. The cartographer who folded it left no instructions, only a warning written on the base: do not iron. We have honoured it. The water, we believe, is grateful.