Fringe Arts Bath - To Bathe

Fringe Arts Bath  is all about raising the profile of contemporary visual arts in Bath, providing opportunities for early-career and emerging artists, and putting art in unusual places in unexpected ways for people to happen across and interact with. Free for all to attend, occupying empty shops, unusual spaces and making appearances around the streets of Bath.

I designed and curated an exhibition ‘To Bathe’,  as part of the festival. My exhibition was inspired by the historical context of Bath and it’s famous water for wellbeing and healing. I put a national call-out to artists and also researched and contacted relevant artists whose bathing related works experimented with form and style. They were asked to submit works that explored or commented on bathing, whether as a solitary or social action.

 I selected 17 artists working in various mediums including:

Films

Lucie Sheppard - Drift

Andrew Duggan - ag fanacht_waiting

Bethe Bronson- What Ophelia Sees

Serena Porrati- Terra Cognita

Robert Laycock – Lake Swim

Stills Images

Lisa Fryer – Cleveland Pools

Writers and Stories ( Audio recording played in Gallery during exhibition and read live at Cleveland Pools)

Stephanie Weston:  The Spirit of Christian Charity

Christine Roberts: In Deep Water

Lisa Fryer:  The Girl in the Pool

Lisa Fryer (read by Philip Perry): The High Dive

Elaine Miles: Beauty Pageant

Julie Green: I Only Want To Be With You

Tricia Wastvedt: Bel and I

Mark Rutterford:  Wet Footprints

Clare Reddaway: The Housemaid

Clare Reddaway: Samantha Snooge and the Lidothon

Artworks

1. Abigail Littlewood –‘Disgust with my body’ and ‘Bug/Insect bath’

2. Elise Fraser – ‘Brenda and Doreen’

3. Honor Carter – Pool photo

4. Jessa Fairbrother – ‘Yield’ and ‘Untitled’ from ‘Conversations with my mother’

5. Kate Broadhurst –‘Me and the universe’

6. Leah Crews – Collection of prints of bathing costumes

7. Lydia Glenday – ‘The Swimmer’ and ‘Valley of the Dolls’

8. Rachael Dickens -  ‘Dream Swim’ and a collection of found object swimmers

The exhibition allowed the audience to reassess their own relationship to bathing whilst becoming voyeurs of others whilst they bathed. I decorated an empty shop space, built a new floor and walls and curated and hung works, wrote a catalogue of works, edited sound and images and set up technical equipment.

I created my own art piece in which I designed and built a mobile bathing hut so that I could take the submitted artists films and stories out of the gallery and into the general public for viewing so that the films and stories from the exhibition could be seen outside of the usual gallery space, out in the open air.

I cycled the Bathing Hut around the streets of Bath and collected people’s stories of bathing, their relationships to water and how it made them feel. The Bathing Hut also became part of the Clevedon Pools storytelling event and I took the Bathing Hut to show as part of the Bedlam Fair outdoors performances.