Amici x Brooke Benington

Katie Tomlinson
Bathers Bathing

Drawing on and appropriating imagery from art history, mythology and archival sources, Tomlinson reworks familiar visual languages through surreal narrative, humour, distortion and excess. Her paintings frequently position female figures within psychologically charged and unstable environments, where intimacy, boredom, desire, vulnerability and resistance collapse into one another. Through vivid colour, gestural abstraction and symbolic disruption, Tomlinson both inhabits and unsettles the patriarchal traditions from which her imagery emerges.

 

What do bathers do all day? Confined to the canvas and bound to repetition: to bathe, to idle, to linger endlessly at the water’s edge. Above all, to appear private while remaining permanently public, forever available to the gaze. For centuries, art history has archived the bather, permanently inscribed within visual culture. Cemented in oil paint, she is forced to exist for eternity. As the world shifts around her, she is fixed. Just as her femininity cannot escape the patriarchal gaze, she cannot escape the canvas.

 

She has seen her civilisation collapse — or perhaps she destroyed it herself. She has watched history repeat itself over and over, yet she remains suspended: still bathing. After centuries of being watched, she is bored.

 

Reclaimed, reworked, and stolen from art history, these bathers are not passive subjects; they are cunning, excessive, and unruly. They are conscious of the gaze — they return it, look through it, mock it, manipulate it, and remain unfazed. They embrace excess and boredom equally. With nothing left to do but wait for the end of time, they indulge. Fires rage around them; they bathe wherever water can be found — a small pond, a dog bowl, even inside a bladder — whilst unbothered by the apocalyptic scenes unfolding both in and out of the frame. Trapped and transcendent amid the collapse of everything.

 

Bored, cheeky, unamused, ready to be engulfed by flames. Above all, they are done caring. Whether defiant or detached, they are simply trying to exist on their own terms — or as close to that as the imagined privacy of the canvas allows. Yet the paradox remains: forever observed, whether they resist it or not. To look at the bathers is to become implicated in their capture.