Deep Sea Bather

In Deep Sea Bather, Tomlinson reworks a figure from Childe Hassam’s etching Deep Sea Bathers (1920), held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Originally depicting a group of women at leisure, the source image is fractured and isolated here, with a single bather removed from the collective and placed alone on a rocky shoreline, looking out towards the sea and horizon.

Dislocated from the group, she appears left outside of narrative time, suspended in a state of prolonged solitude. The sea before her is marked by the aftermath of excess: having consumed all the fish, only skeletal remains drift upwards through the water. Above, the night sky is interrupted by a fleet of UFOs drawn from a 1962 sighting in Sheffield, held within the UK Ministry of Defence UFO archives. The photograph, widely circulated in the national press at the time, was initially treated as evidence before being dismissed in 1972 when its maker confessed it was a hoax, claiming the image had been created by painting flying saucers onto glass. In the 1990s, he later retracted this confession and restated that the sighting was genuine after all.