Project: A print installation of a swimming pool

Time: 1996/1997

Exhibited: Haru Kobo, Tsukuba, Japan; John Batten Gallery, Hong Kong; Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank, Ginza, Japan

I have always loved swimming. Entering into water is exhilarating and propelling oneself through it is never a dull experience. When I worked in the heart of Tokyo I used to stop on the way home and swim in an enormous indoor pool. Unless I went at an odd time during the day, the pool was so full of people that each person had to swim in lanes just a few strokes behind the body in front. Often, we had to get out of the pool at the end of the lane, go to the back of a small queue and wait to re-enter the water.

Once an hour everyone was whistled out of the pool by guards so that they could check the water for bodies (struggling or drowned, I suppose). For five silent minutes the water of the pool would calm to a glassy surface, then another whistle meant that the whole teeming experience could start again. Yet the swimming was always restorative and, despite the threshing of many limbs, underwater was a silent, natural, less urgent world. Perhaps this is how it was when we were all minute creatures dividing and developing billions of years ago in primeval waters. 

In the summer of 1997, I completed a group of some 50 prints of swimming figures to be displayed as an installation. They were shown in Haru Kobo, a large gallery in Tsukuba, a suburb outside Tokyo. The prints took up three walls of the gallery and suggested to the viewer that they had entered a swimming pool and were surrounded by swimmers. The prints ran round the wall in two rows of 25 sheets, making up a total of 50 sheets that stretched for 15 metres and were 1.8 metres high.

The next year, the prints were exhibited in the first John Batten Gallery in Sheungwan, Hong Kong.

 

The swimmer with goggles and a block of six smaller prints were displayed in the main 'shop' window of the downtown headquarters of the Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank. From behind the huge glass front window of the bank, the swimming figures gazed out calmly onto the hustle and bustle of shoppers and commuters in Ginza.

 

Above: First group of swimming figures (sixteen panels)

Left: Second group of swimming figures (six panels)

Below: Section between groups of swimming figures

Third and fourth group of swimmers (six panels each) 

 Fifth group of swimmers (eight panels), the frieze then carries back to the beginning.