Bathing Places: Screening Water Worlds

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In association with 37 Looe Street's Bathing Places exhibition (37 Looe Street gallery, open Thursday-Saturday 11-5 until 26th September), this special screening includes all the artists' films shown as part of the exhibition, as well as a first screening of Geography of an Archive by Vesna Lukic and Nicole Khayat, whose painting and archival works evoking Khayat Beach in Palestine are included in the exhibition.

These films reflect a spectrum of watery worlds and bodies in bodies of water. Artists connect. In these films, the waters of other seas lap onto the shores of the Sound, bathers from other beaches visit. Water finds its way and we are reminded of our place on a planet. 71% of the Earth's surface is water-covered and yet pollution, war, climate change imperil so much of that resource. Bathing is an act of immersion. Becoming part of another element. An eternal act yet one not to be taken for granted. In these films, the liquid treasure of these spaces and beings is vividly and variously represented.

Introduction from curators, Angela Piccini and Sefryn Penrose.

Rachael Allain - Double Equinox, 2025
A film in two parts of swimmers entering the water at the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox (9 degrees and 17 degrees respectively) - filmed at Goodrington Sands and made as a commission from the English Riviera Global Geopark.

Rachel Allain is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher based in the South West, working with expanded notions of photography, artists' moving image and scientific data to reveal invisible realms of our visible world.

Molly Burrows - Moving with the Sun, 2026
Made up of eighty ceramic tiles, the series forms a short animation, with each individual tile serving as a frame in the video. Three figures move with the sun, emerging from the waves and embracing before melting back into the sea and folding in on one another.

Molly Burrows is a South London-based artist working with collage, ceramics and paint to tell stories of characters in their environment. She is also a swim teacher and has taught students aged from twelve weeks to ninety years old, sharing her love of water with each of them.

Laura Denning - Complicit, 2016; Liquid Song, 2015
Complicit is a fusion of footage from the artist's local swimming pool and from Mothecombe beach. It seeks to foreground how we are all complicit in our own anxiety about climate change, but that some (the ubiquitous 'men in suits') are more complicit than others. Liquid Song uses footage from a private pool at a gallery in Brussels, plus a soundtrack featuring the dawn chorus slowed right down to evoke primeval pasts.

Laura Denning is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and academic based in the South West whose eco-focused practice merges geography, ecology, and social participation.

Bryony Gillard - Heatwave, 2025
Heatwave recalls a summer trip to a dirty river and subsequent conversations and anecdotes about privatisation of water, closure of public toilets and the ways these failing public structures affect the most vulnerable. Two children concoct a mysterious watery recipe or potion. It is a chapter of My Wits or Salts, an episodic moving image work exploring porous entanglements between waste, body, and environment.

Bryony Gillard is an artist, educator and PhD Candidate at University of Plymouth. Her practice reflects on events, states of being, materials and organisms that refuse or resist normative capitalist structures and temporalities.

Sadie Hennesey - The Parade, 2025

The Parade is a collage film made with Year 1 Foundation Art students at East Kent College. Using archive footage and exploring masquerade, the film juxtaposes beauty pageant Margate with a folkloric connection with beasts.

Hennessy is a multi-media artist based in Margate. She casts her work through the dark prism of melancholia, mixed with a sense of humour. She is the originator of Margate's annual Blessing of the Beasts ritual parade.

William Luz - A Line Made While Swimming, 2026

A Line Made by Swimming documents a swim in Plymouth Sound. Filmed from the shore it is a meditation on drawing, a more humble form than the artwork's namesake by Richard Long. Here, the water immediately draws back. Luz's head becomes a dot travelling in a line, buffeted by the currents; this line is a dot that went for a swim.

William Luz an artist and educator based in Plymouth. His work usually finds form as drawings, moving image, or installations that reflect back on this action, thinking about process and trying to look at drawing from a different, embodied, expanded angle.

Vesna Lukic and Nicole Khayat - Geography of an Archive, 2026

Geography of an Archive is a feature-length documentary film in progress that explores the Khayat family's archive of twentieth-century life in Haifa, Palestine. Working with photographs, letters, journals and family memories, the film responds to an account of the 1931 opening of Khayat Beach, established by local entrepreneur Azeez Khayat.

Vesna Lukic is an artist, filmmaker and educator based in London. Her work often explores the difficult and contested relationships between archives and place. Nicole Khayat is a Palestinian historian of the modern Middle East.

Sefryn Penrose & Angela Piccini - Forty Suit/e - 2017/2026

Forty Suit/e is a rite of passage: a ceremony of life crisis, a recipe for regeneration. A transition from one state to another. A big birthday, burn out, bereavement, break-up prompts a challenge to be undertaken in the suit you were born in. A liminal splash: forty naked swims in your fortieth year.

Sefryn Penrose and Angela Piccini are artists, researchers and co-directors of the Bureau for the Contemporary and Historic (ButCH) and 37 Looe Street, an artist-led gallery and studio in Plymouth. Working collaboratively across visual art, film, heritage, and socially engaged practice, they create projects that blend humour, performance, storytelling, and place magic.