Rosalind Jana has made Tarka Kings forthcoming show Mornings at the Lido the lead in her most recent article for the FT.
In 'Art about swimming? It’s the ultimate refresh' Jana writes in detail about Tarka's work and connects it to a number of other artists making work on this subject including Modupeola Fadugba, Marvel Harris, Ackerman + Gruber, Kate Gottgens, Modupeola Fadugba, Roni Horn, Noah Davis and Evie O’Connor.
"...Kings has been swimming at the lido in Hyde Park most mornings for five years, through winter frosts and scorching summers. “It’s like starting each day anew,” says the London-born artist. “You’ve clicked into something deeper, more mysterious. You get in touch with being in your body.” But when she started thinking about how to depict her experience, she encountered a problem. How do you capture the feeling of swimming? From a first-person perspective, the eyeline is mainly ducks and water. Zoom out to watch from the sidelines and it’s all bobbing heads and murky, refracted limbs.
Kings decided to focus instead on the “strange and sacred” effects of bathing via the transitional – shedding clothes, entering the water and returning post-immersion. There’s “a literal changing and a metaphorical changing,” she says. The resulting portraits, featuring one of her son’s friends, are quietly intimate. Kings’ pencil lingers over the textures of towels and the blue-black sheen of dripping hair. She gets closer to the mundane magic of the experience: sometimes transformative, sometimes contemplative, sometimes an unremarkable part of the day. They recall Iris Murdoch’s observation that “swimming, like dying, seems to solve all problems: and you remain alive...”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: FT
