THE SWIMMER
The Swimmer I, pen and ink, 18”x20”
The Swimmer II, pen and ink, 18”x20”
The Swimmer III, pen and ink, 18”x20”
The Swimmer IV, pen and ink, 18”x20”
The Swimmer V, pen and ink, 18”x20”
The Swimmer VI, pen and ink, 18”x20”
Summer bathers float, immersed in undulating, green mats of Enteromorpha prolifera.
Lucy Kavaler sits at her desk, contemplating how to capture in prose an organism that ranges from the single-celled to the complex multicellular. Multiplying in toxic blooms in a hypoxic ocean, is it a harbinger of end times? Fuel, food, fibre, fertilizer, will our hopes and dreams proliferate on swaying beds of kelp and in petri dishes of agar?
A lone figure emerges from the waves, trailing tendrils of Ascophyllum nodosum across sun-warmed granite, and with the tangled strands forms the letters A-L-G-A-E
Merging autobiography, historical fabulation and speculative fiction, The Swimmer approaches macroalgae as a vehicle for time travel, entangling 18th century phycological treatise Historia Fucorum with algae-curious 20th-century American journalist Lucy Kavaler and the artist’s own visits to both littoral zone and botanical library.
Taking both title and inspiration from a short story by John Cheever and the 1968 film adapted from it, these drawings form a loose storyboard for yet-to-be-realised artefacts of yearning and obsessive curiosity.
All images copyright © M Goldstrom 2021-2026. No reproduction of any content unless with prior consent.