Low sunlight casts the shadows of figures, standing on the Frankwell footbridge in Shrewsbury across the River Severn, into trees. The willows have shaken loose from leafing, and the light that strikes them has a brilliance no longer absorbed by hungry foliage. The trees are illuminated, freed from the processes of growth, and the river has risen to meet them.

The shadows stand in the golden branches above a bend in the river, and look back at us. They are dark and shift slightly, mirroring our movements, but not enough to feel we are the same thing. We’re not. They are strangers, watching. Freud may have called them doppelgangers: uncanny versions of our repressed selves. Jung may have seen them as unconscious personalities that we project on to others because of the struggles we have with ourselves. The shadows are not watching us, though: they’re watching the river.

Storm Claudia’s deluge bucketed through the Severn’s catchment; all the ditches, drains and brooks from the hills of mid-Wales to here burst with rain and runoff; piss and poison; anything not nailed down wound up in the river. The water roils darkly, its surface is pitted and wrinkled; there are swirls and vortices, pitches and gullies, an architecture formed by huge energies beneath.

No mallards surf the flow, the river has a deadly seriousness now. Birds keep a distance, hiding in stark vegetation behind the light and above the water. What happens to fish in this avalanche of suspended things, hammering through the border lowlands towards pinch points such as the Ironbridge Gorge? All those millions of tonnes of water shoot the bends, and, where there are no barriers, they spill. Fields and carparks become lakes; roads and hedges submerge, dividing nothing; floods have a weird stillness and a long memory.

The River Severn casts its shadow across the land. Whatever people have put in its way has little effect, and the strength and frequency of recent storms suggest the flood’s power will only increase. The Severn’s flood is a shadow life that does not belong entirely to the river that brings it or the land it covers; it’s uncanny, an animistic subconscious that arrives and departs with indifference.