Swimmers

Joanne’s primary subjects, the figure and water, intersect with her Swimmer paintings. The love of water and swimming is deeply rooted in her family. Summers and holidays were spent in the water, and swimming was a joyful act of play. Yet swimming can also be a meditative and solitary experience. These two themes converge in her recent Swimmer works — solitary swimmers with a joyful sense of exploration and play. They are cropped tighter and more intimately, drawing the viewer closer and slightly abstracting the figure. And Joanne’s shift in colour palette to less realistic tones is an exploration in colour, inspired by analogue photography and experimental film.