This text was produced as an accompanying text for Fiona Harman and Steve Paraskos' installation The Pool, which was exhibited at Smart Casual in mid-2017.
Documentation of this work can be found here: https://www.fionaharman.com/2017-the-pool/
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It began as a desire to return to the womb.
To float again in perfect equilibrium.
We paid workmen to dig a pit, seven by three metres.
And we coated that pit with cement and then with pacific blue tiles.
To give the effect that the portion of water we would have in our backyard was part of a larger whole.
That all the pools, in all the backyards, could be stitched together into an inland sea.
And ours would be part of that.
So, aquamarine tiles, an illusion of depth.
A paved area to surround this, Mediterranean.
And soon children, to shriek in delight and they pushed and pulled and plunged into its surface over the summer.
The sound of innocent laughter and the dappled splashes of the water at the pool’s edge.
A perfect harmony, to be appreciated from the other side of sliding glass doors, or from the shade of the verandah.
And, as the night falls, and the children are put to bed, the pool is heated.
Now it is different, adult.
The warm water womb-like again, but free of children.
A playful, consequence free space, charged with sexual tension.
Me, swimming laps.
Her, sipping a drink in the conjoined jacuzzi.
But never anything as crass as actually touching.
Just exchanged looks and knowing grins:
We are both imagining fucking in the pool and we both know it.
The water, lit from below, so unlike the surface during the day.
Almost immaterial.
I float.
Warm and satisfied with myself, basking in the steam that escapes the surface.
Perhaps the attraction now is animal.
To the pool.
Perhaps now I do not desire a return to the womb, to become a child again.
But rather I want to go further back in time.
To return to the sea.
All the pools in world, stitched together into an ocean that we might return to safely.
To regress into a fish, and only be able to remember a few seconds of the past.
And to reproduce without touching.
Eggs and spermatozoa mixing in the pristine, chlorinated ocean.
The water an extension of our bodies.
We could float forever, and not really feel anything.
Fleeting moments of experience in a timeless void.
No sense of yesterday or tomorrow.
No sense of narrative.
Of meaning.
Just a cool world of light and salt and stimulus.
Reactions immediately forgotten.
Ah, the bliss that would come with being adrift like this.
In a great void of not-knowing.
But a plane tears overhead and bring me to my senses.
And my fantasy is gone.
There is no womb. There is no great, pristine sea.
The artificiality of my oasis is suddenly apparent.
And the noise and stresses of the world return to me as a wall of sound and association.
And a gust of wind whips at a tree in my neighbours backyard.
And delivers a collection of its leaves to the surface of the pool.
Tomorrow I will retrieve those that still float with a net, while a robot scrubs the ones that sink from the bottom.
And the children will shriek, and one will slip on the wet edge and graze its knee.
And reveal itself to be more than an accessory for the pool.
And I will tend to the wound, and the warm blood on my hand as I clean it will be difficult to distinguish from the pool water I will lay in that night.
And the neighbours will yell.
And planes will tear.
And knowing looks will be exchanged,
And I will fantasise about thinking less, and be interrupted.
And the wind will whip at the tree.
And the leaves will fall.
And so on.
I think.
Feel.
As I float.