Sumpf Wassernixe by Paul Klee is part of a larger project Back to the Marshes that charts the role of material topologies and their artistic properties in human hands. With Paul Klee as the author’s main guide, this essay is organised as a startling feuilleton that unfolds into a bold compendium of artistic musings, a paean to free speech and a signpost towards new hermeneutic pathways. It leads Barbara Baert to reconsider the challenges of Bildwissenschaft in the current Geological Turn and the role of marshes as myth and medium in particular.

And this, ultimately, is what water does: it leaves behind uniquely fragile and ephemeral traces. Water is one endless creative process. Sandbanks become drawings, sea foam becomes lace, the rocks are polished, carved and sanded, and the banks of the marshes, with their mossy green and ochre silts, glisten like pigments on a canvas.

Barbara Baert (b. 1967) is Professor in Medieval Art, Iconology and Historiography at the KU Leuven. Her work links knowledge and questions from the history of ideas, cultural anthropology and philosophy, and is deeply sensitive to cultural archetypes and their symptoms in the visual arts. Baert is the recipient of several awards, including the prestigious Belgian Francqui Prize for Human Sciences in 2016. She held the Aby Warburg Professor at the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg in 2023, where she completed a three-month residency.