Upcoming Exhibition

Swimming a Long Way Together

Vanessa Daws

September 19 - November 22 2024

This new exhibition by Vanessa Daws is the culmination of the project Swimming a Long Way Together, an ambitious art and swimming project, 2021-2024, curated by Rosie Hermon. The project is a multi-sited celebration of open-water and endurance swimming, its histories and communities, inspired by the pioneer swimmer Mercedes Gleitze.

Launching on the River Liffey, it has since travelled around the island of Ireland – to Midleton, Co. Cork, Donaghadee and Galway – to Brighton and Dover in England, shadowing key locations and moments in Mercedes’ life and swimming career. The exhibition brings together new and existing artworks and documents of the project and of Vanessa’s recent English Channel swim, which she completed 97 years after Mercedes Glietze became the first British woman to complete this crossing.

Central to the exhibition is the first presentation in Ireland of the film ‘At Home in the Water’, which premiered in Brighton in 2022. Meshing together the swimmer’s inward monologue, the physical sensation of the water and the challenge of the open water endurance swim, the artwork invites us to wonder what strange fascination the sea has for us, why we choose to immerse ourselves in it and feel compelled to navigate it.

Within the exhibition space this is contextualised within Vanessa’s own journey across the Channel this summer. Part of Vanessa Daws’ fascination for Mercedes Gleitze is in the resonance across time between their two practices, which bring together swimming and the creative arts. For Mercedes, music and performance were essential to her success as she would always request musical accompaniment when she swam – musicians playing to her from boats, singers, a gramophone. Almost one hundred years later Vanessa’s practice can be seen as existing in the wake of Mercedes Gleitze. For Vanessa, swimming sits at the core of her artistic identity; as an enquiry into place, as a performance, and as a generative process that spills over into many more traditional artistic mediums – drawing, painting, filmmaking, photography, sculpture and participatory practice.

Indeed, the bringing together of people and communities in the production of artwork is in evidence in the cube gallery. A shoal of clay sea creatures accompany a ceramic swimmer. Made by hundreds of people across Dublin Bay and swimming amongst fish made in Dover last year, this artwork is just one example of the “togetherness” of Vanessa’s ways of working. This is exhibited alongside the song ‘As easy stop the sea’ written by artist and musician Ruth Clinton, and performed by Landless. Vanessa commissioned this song at the start of the project and it has been interwoven throughout.

The exhibition includes a film by filmmaker Barry Lynch. Composed of footage of the Swimming a Long Way Together live events, it follows the project themes through discussions between key contributors and participants, drawn from across the geographies that the project has covered. The exhibition also serves as the launch of the Swimming a Long Way Together publication, designed by Peter Maybury, alongside other artworks and images which have been produced and collated over the course of the last four years. All of which reflect the inspiring nature and ongoing influence of Mercedes Gleitze, a fellow swimmer in the journey of the project.

 

Vanessa Daws

Vanessa Daws is a long-distance swimmer and visual artist based in Dublin, her art practice works at the intersection of art, swimming and place. Swimming, journey, chance encounter and conversation are the starting points for her projects. Vanessa has been developing a multi-layered way of working with different communities in different disciplines, all connected through particular bodies of water.

Rosie Hermon

Rosie Hermon is a curator and researcher based in London. Raised in Brighton, the birthplace of Mercedes Gleitze. Rosie has spent several years working around and across the English Channel, particularly as a co-curator of the diep~haven festival. More recently she has been thinking in the interstices of international cultural networks as part of her PhD research, bringing her interest in engaging communities of interest across distributed geographies to Swimming a Long Way Together. Vanessa met Rosie when Rosie visited her in her then Temple Bar Gallery, Project Studio in 2017. Here they discussed the English Channel as a starting point for artistic research and a potential project. This idea stayed with them until in 2019 they started to hatch a plan and put in an application to the Arts Council of Ireland Open Call Award. They were successful with this award in 2021 and the rest is ‘Swimming a Long Way Together’ history!

Mercedes Gleitze

Mercedes Gleitze undertook many challenging and pioneering swims in the 1920s and ‘30s, across Ireland, Britain and beyond. She was the first British woman to swim the English Channel in 1927. Mercedes spent much time swimming in Ireland, including swimming for 19 hours from Inis Meáin to Awleen Bay in Spiddal, and attempting to swim across the North Channel 8 times in 1928 and 1929, though this swim was never completed. Mercedes swam in many record-breaking Endurance Swims. An Endurance Swim is where a swimmer swims continually around a pool for many hours without stopping or touching the bottom. In 1930 Mercedes swam for 30 hours in the Eglinton Street Baths in Cork, and 42 hours in the Tara Street Baths in Dublin.

From humble origins Mercedes became celebrated for her swimming achievements, huge audiences would come to cheer her on or to greet her whenever she emerged from the water. Music played a central role, as an accompaniment and support, helping to create a festive atmosphere and raising her spirits as she swam.

Doloranda Pember wrote a book “In the Wake of Mercedes Gleitze” about her mother Mercedes Glitz’s epic and groundbreaking swims. This book and Mercedes’ swims became the source of inspiration for the Swimming a Long Way Together journey. Doloranda has become a friend, advisor and contributor to the Swimming a Long Way Together project.