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SWIMMING BEYOND THE FLAGS | Solo show | Harvey Galleries | Opens Nov 7
If you're in Sydney, you're most welcome to attend.
For a catalogue of the works, please reach out to Trevor and his team.
I'll also be giving an artist talk on the Saturday at the gallery if you'd like to join.
As a child growing up in Australia in the sixties and seventies, we were constantly
told to “swim between the flags” — a reference to the patrolled sections of the beach
where lifesavers (now lifeguards) kept watch, protecting swimmers from rips and
undertows.
But as I got older and became a surfer, the whole notion of swimming between the
flags came to represent something else entirely: control, constraint, authority.
For good reason, surfers were told to keep out of the flags — and that suited us fine.
We were the outsiders. In the press, we were cast as antisocial, a subculture of salt-
stained rebels. An “us versus them” siege mentality developed. Boards were
confiscated. Surfers were castigated.
Today, the picture is very different. Surfers are lifeguards, and lifeguards are surfers.
The once-rigid lines in the sand have blurred, if not vanished altogether.
Swimming beyond the flags now feels like a quiet nod to another era — a time when
defiance meant thumbing your nose at authority, and when the beach stood as one
of the last true frontiers of freedom and self-expression.
-- I look forward to seeing you at the show.