‘The day was beautiful and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty’
Quoted from ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever.
The vague notion we began with is of ‘altered states of mind’ induced by wild swimming and an aesthetic response to these. As the photographer Robert Frank writes ‘The project …..is one that will shape itself as it proceeds and is essentially elastic’. We agreed to act on this principal.
The project was inspired by three literary sources – a short story entitled ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheevers, a longer journal entitled‘Waterlog’ by Roger Deakin, and a book on anthropology/archaeology entitled ‘Inside the Neolithic mind’ by David Lewis Williams which discusses altered states of mind.
The ‘missing chapter’ in Deakin’s book – which involves a swim across the Lakes – would be another aspect of this elastic project.
