I began this series in fall 2007 after discovering of old life guarding manuals and swimming instruction books from the 1920s. Stripped of the context of the books, the photos and text are ominous and disturbing fodder with which to create works that only loosely have anything to do with swimming and to me address the roots of fear and the struggles of interpersonal communication more than anything else.
								rescue. is about good intentions and failures to communicate. It is about hurting the ones we love. The series began with the discovery of a 1928 life guarding handbook that stressed the importance of disabling drowning victims before attempting to pull them to safety. I was struck by the violent holds and breaks and by the very real idea that two people could manage to kill each other with their overlapping purposes, good intentions, and miscommunication. For me these struggling swimmers are metaphors for all of the complicated relationships in our lives.