Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without.
So begins this wonderful book by Leanne Shapton. I’d seen her paintings at Lutyens & Rubentein but hadn’t realised she was also a writer. This is a memoir of her days training as an Olympic swimmer and of how that obsession shaped her later life as an artist. I’m no swimmer, maybe a gentle back paddle, preferably in a river rather than a pool, but I’m buoyed up by reading Swimming Studies.
