Artist’s solo exhibition is really in the swim
Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:04:00 BST
Artist Lisa Stansbie draws on open-water swimming for her solo collection in Belfast entitled Nothing Great is Easy
WHEN University of Huddersfield lecturer and artist Lisa Stansbie (as seen in the video) took up the challenge of long-distance, open-water swimming, her art found a new direction too.
The culture, artefacts and physical endurance of swimming became key elements of her photographs, sculptures and short films. Now she has mounted a full solo exhibition of this material. Named Nothing Great is Easy – words attributed to Captain Matthew Webb, the first Channel swimmer in 1875 – it has been on view at Platform Arts in Belfast since the start of September.
The gallery put out an open call for artists to submit proposals for solo shows and there was a global response. Dr Stansbie – who is Head of Art and Communication in the University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture – was one of those whose submission impressed the Platform Arts board, so that she was offered a three-week solo exhibition.
It consists of 60 collage drawings, eight sculptures and two short films, all themed on or inspired by open-water swimming. For example, there are sculptures produced from “found objects”, such as the sports bottles carried by swimmers or the tubs of Vaseline used to grease the swimmers’ bodies.
One of the films is named Acclimatisation (pictured left), in which Dr Stansbie appears herself (an excerpt of this appears in the video after Dr Stansbie's interview).
“It is virtually a documentary, about the process of trying to acclimatise myself to cold water for the Channel. When you come out of cold water you experience something called ‘after drop’, where you shake very badly, so I filmed myself going through the process over and over again. I couldn’t speak or film properly so unintentionally it is actually quite a funny film!”
It was in 2007, that Dr Stansbie developed her passion for open-water swimming. She has taken part in many races, and highlights include swimming the length of Derwentwater to win the British Long Distance Swimming Association’s two-mile event. She was organiser and team member of the 2012 Etwall Eagles English Channel Relay Team, which swum the channel in 11 hours and 45 minutes. Also, she is a founder of a company named The Big Blue, which organises escorted swimming holidays in the clear, warm waters of Greece.
About two years ago, Dr Stansbie started to use her new-found passion for swimming as a basis for art.
“I realised that there was a lot of potential to use the objects, the training and some of the language,” she said, adding that the act of swimming could be an artistic experience in itself, a performance or with the mind-ranging far and wide during a long outdoor swim.
The collage drawings that feature in Nothing Great is Easy are also to be shown at forthcoming exhibition in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates. In the meantime, there is a new influence on her work and it also has an underlying theme of endurance... for she has recently taken up the sport of triathlon.
Pictured below: Installations of Dr Stansbie's exhibition; (Clockwise) Vaseline sculpture, Platform Arts logo, far end of exhibition and a projection of feeding apparatus.
