• Small font

• Artist
  Jess MacNeil
• Title
  The Swimmers
• Date of Production
  2009
• Medium
  high definition digital video with sound,
• Dimensions
  4 minutes on an infinite loop, unlimited edition
• Credit Details
  commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for MOVE: Video Art in School, courtesy the artist and Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

PROJECT - Jess MacNeil: The Swimmers

A serene and tranquil image played in slow motion of an ocean pool against an ocean backdrop, endlessly looping in a continual rise and fall of waves, takes the viewer to a cool and calm place. Soon, wisps of broken water appear on the surface of the pool - the swimmers have been digitally removed but their wake remains, suggesting impermanence, the transience of individual passage.

The swimmers is a meditation on the movements of the water and the contrast between human and natural, the solid line between pool and ocean, containable and uncontainable, permanent and impermanent.

MacNeil's art practice is interested in humans place in physical space and their relationship to it and each other. The Swimmers is at once familiar and strange, comforting and quietly eerie. It alludes to human mortality and the insignificance of the individual but also how the way our actions can linger long after we are gone.