Jess MacNeil The Swimmers

The Swimmers presents an apparently simple scene of an ocean pool against an ocean backdrop, played in slow motion, looping endlessly and seamlessly. The footage has been digitally manipulated to remove the bodies of the swimmers in the pool, leaving only the conditions and effect of their presence – the disturbance of the water in the pool, the shadows left by their bodes. This, along with the mesmeric motion of the ocean waves and their effects on the water in the pool, composes the work.

The scene is cropped to a minimal, perspectivally flattened composition. The defining geometry of the central concrete wall is expanded upon in the geometric lines of the swimming pool. Beyond the wall, the powerful force of the ocean wells and pulls in organic contrast, swirling and pulsing against the wall.

The absent bodies of the swimmers are emphatically implicated by the surrounding context. The ripples and shadows they cause allow us to follow graphically the effects of their passage through the water. They fan out over time, interact with the architecture of the pool and the ripples of other swimmers, fluctuate in the light, accommodate a missed stroke.

That the swimmers are gone but their effect remains highlights the repercussions of our presence and actions, left to play out in our wake. On one hand this alludes to chaos theory and the bewildering possibilities implied by what is commonly known as “the butterfly effect”. On the other it inevitably suggests contemplation of loss, and questioning of what this implies for that which is left behind but cannot be so easily disentangled. The Swimmers pictures part of a sequence within a reverberating continuum, tracing the effects of human passage in an environment we cannot possibly control, yet are irrevocably implicated within.

As the video plays, water spills from the ocean over the concrete wall, initiating new patterns of ripples to disrupt the pool’s straight lines, intermingling with the wake of the swimmers. The division between the two bodies of water is notional; the water in the pool is the same salt sea as that of the ocean, which fills and replenishes it entirely. Clear separation is undermined; order and disorder, randomness and intentionality blur with the wall’s transgression.

The proportional strength of the ocean will eventually completely engulf the now seemingly solid pool. Different and overlapping scales of time are at play. A bird flits past, the swimmer breathes, waves follow one another, the tides return. The erosion of the wall with time is inevitable.

The video loops infinitely; a once unique moment now endlessly repeated. The small waves of influence caused by the body of a swimmer continue to resonate. Like memory, like the tides, perhaps like time, they return. The work places the transience of individual passage against a much greater scale of time.

This place, two expanses of water abutting a concrete wall, could be many places. But the iconic location, The Bondi Icebergs ocean pool, is strangely recognisable to many even with such minimal visual information. The Swimmers can be read both as an endless replaying of individual journeys through a specific iconic space, and as an open-ended depiction of the passage of utterly anonymous invisible bodies in an abstract generalised zone. At play between the unique and the anonymous, the individual and the collective, The swimmers explores the schisms between specific, personal, and general experience.

Visually the work is linked to painting tradition over the centuries and as continued in contemporary art today. The water itself is reminiscent of oil paint or watercolour, its movements conjuring brush marks, while the fixed frame and subdued movement within also allies the work with photography. The time warp of its endless loop alludes to techniques of contemporary narrative, and exploration in film and literature of time travel and temporal loops. Seascape and landscape painting tradition, geometric abstraction, colour field painting and minimalist practices are all important influences in the eventuality of this work.

For me, the presence of these visual and conceptual alliances is reassuring rather than intentional. The Swimmers is a meditation on time and the human habitation of space, and continues my ongoing artistic negotiation of these concerns. These points of reference lend gravitas to my own attempts to comprehend and articulate my place in and experience of the world, situating my practice as part of a continuum, providing the context by which the work can make sense.