Lizzie Buckmaster Dove, 'Coming up for Breath'

Lizzie Buckmaster Dove swims daily laps in her local sea pool. Excavated from the rock platform, the pool belies appearances: it is manmade but has become part of the natural landscape, hinged between land and sea. Swimming laps situates the body in this hinterland geography. The body moves up and down the length of the pool, gesturally mark-making and mapping. Manifesting a space separate from the unrelenting narrative of the news cycle, feeding us minute by minute updates of covid, bush fire, flood, political one-upmanship, catastrophe. Over and over the artist returns, mirroring the tide that sometimes consumes the pool, to enter a liminal world. Swimming back to breath and self, swimming self into place.