Jason Hicklin | Dark River, To the Source of the Thames

We appear to be at the close of a fascinating chapter in the career of this most compelling of artists. Dark River is the fourth and final instalment of Jason Hicklin’s extraordinary seven-year engagement with the Thames. Yet to describe it simply as the completion of a journey from estuary to source would impose an order that was never there. Jason has not approached the river as a cartographer. The river has supplied the course, but not the itinerary. That has emerged through walking, looking, returning and discovery.

On Thame’s banks in silent thought we stood

Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood

Samuel Johnson, ‘London’ 1738

The project began in 2019 with Jason returning to the river he had first walked and drawn as a young art-school graduate nearly thirty years earlier. From there came renewed encounters with the city, transformed by season, shifting perspective and an increasingly obsessive preoccupation with light. Then came the journey downstream towards Woolwich, the Hoo Peninsula and the London Stone, where the Thames begins to relinquish the city and open towards the sea. Jason has said that he did not imagine this part of the project ending at the London Stone; the place revealed itself as a natural destination. Dark River follows the same instinctive logic. Fourteen walks from Greenwich to Thames Head take him in the opposite direction, upstream and inland into the heart of England, until the great river of bridges, industry, skyscrapers and estuarine expanses contracts towards something extraordinarily modest in the low hills of Gloucestershire.

Only now can we see the shape of the whole. But this is not topography assembled mile by mile, but an odyssey of departures and returns, reversals and repetitions, in which one encounter has provoked the next. These encounters have all been conducted on foot and walking is fundamental to Jason’s way of knowing a place. The river bends, alters his position and continually reorganises the landscape around him. Buildings appear to move; distances jar and reveal themselves afresh, familiar views become strange. ‘The whole perspective of the city is altered just by walking it,’ Jason has observed. The river is therefore more than subject: it is an active protagonist, determining where the artist stands in order to look.

And what Jason looks for, unerringly, is light. In the second show in this sequence Cometh Light (2023) Jason wanted illumination to almost obliterate the buildings along the riverside. By Riparius in 2024, sunlight reflected from the widening Thames led him to think of the river as a ‘container of light’, and in his etchings sky and water continually exchanged identities. Dark River gathers these concerns without forcing them into a neat conclusion. Instead, it gives form to the preceding seven years. The final destination is, paradoxically, a beginning: an epic artistic journey arriving at the source. Jason has not simply completed the river; he has revealed the true scale of the creative milestone the river has made possible.

This happy breed of men, this little world…

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

William Shakespeare, Richard II Act 2 Scene 1

Ever since I remember them, the clumps have meant something to me.

I felt their importance long before I knew their history.

They were the pyramids of my small world.

Paul Nash on Wittenham Clumps 1935

What began as a personal return to the Thames of Jason’s youth has expanded into a defining body of work about movement, memory, atmosphere and the unstable act of seeing. Transforming that visceral experience into image has tested Jason’s capabilities as an etcher to new limits and, in the opinion of this viewer at least, driven him towards a career-defining achievement.

Essay by Vincent Eames, 2026