statement :: Swim

I am interested in the landscape as a recreational and social space. Swimming pools and the sea dominate much of my work, as I attempt to examine and reconnect with the environments that surrounded me growing up on the North Island of New Zealand.

Swim

This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools and public baths — sites where the normally parallel spheres of social interaction and solitary communion with nature intersect. Viewed from above, patterns and groupings of people emerge, revealing their interactions both with each other and with their surroundings.

Watermark

This series focuses on outdoor swimming pools that have been drained or abandoned. When full, the surface of a swimming pool is a flat continuation of the pool edge, obscuring what is below the surface. When drained, the depths are revealed — allowing us to examine the empty pool postmortem.

These locations were once bustling social environments, and visiting them was a collective, public experience. Now deserted by swimmers, the experience of visiting these pools is solitary, still and private. Some have become bogs, homes or gardens — new lives that often go unobserved. Photographing them can be a voyeuristic and dark experience. I have focused on an intimate view of these locations, using tight crops which also emphasize the absent, making these photos as much about what is not there as what is there.