Staying Afloat

In Staying Afloat, Tomlinson reworks a figure from Monsieur Thévenot’s De Arte Natandi (1696), itself influenced by Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi (1587), one of the earliest printed treatises on swimming. Produced during a period when bodies were frequently recovered from London’s New River, these manuals combined instruction with survival, offering diagrams and texts on “keeping oneself above water” and “staying afloat” (as per the title).

In Tomlinson’s painting, the swimmer is removed from this context of open water and practical instruction and instead enclosed within a bladder-like form. Displaced from any external environment, she is reduced to perpetual motion within a sealed interior space, swimming continuously without progression or escape. The promise of survival embedded in the original manuals becomes untenable here. What was once a guide to endurance is transformed into a closed system of repetition, where staying afloat no longer signifies safety but enforced continuity. The bladder operates simultaneously as body, container and prison, collapsing distinctions between protection and confinement.

As with the bathers that recur throughout the exhibition, the figure is caught within an endless performance of endurance, compelled to continue moving in the absence of destination, outcome or release. What remains is not survival, but motion without resolution.