Keeping Oneself Above Water

In Keeping Oneself Above Water, Tomlinson reworks a figure from Monsieur Thévenot’s De Arte Natandi (1696), itself heavily influenced by Everard Digby’s De Arte Natandi (1587), one of the earliest printed treatises on swimming. Produced in a period when bodies were frequently recovered from London’s New River, these manuals combined instruction with survival, offering diagrams and techniques for “keeping oneself above water” (as per title). Though the original figure is labelled in the manual as a man, Tomlinson is drawn to the figure’s feminised appearance, which was originally described to suggest vulnerability and an inability to swim.

In Tomlinson’s painting, the swimmer is reduced to a prone figure lying face down in a puddle during heavy rain. The expansive ambitions of the swimming manual collapse into a minimal, repetitive situation: no river, no horizon, no destination—only a small body of water and a figure continuing within it. Despite appearing exhausted or stranded in this reduced state, the figure continues to eat green olives, maintaining a small, incongruous act of pleasure within the puddle. This gesture interrupts any reading of pure despair, reframing the scene through the exhibition’s wider concern with boredom, excess and the persistence of minor, absurd pleasurable behaviours within conditions of constraint.