The best thing to do is just to dive right in. That’s the kind of thing I say to the students in my Art Writing class. I have no idea what it actually means. I don’t even know if it’s true. I certainly don’t think I do it most of the time—and, of course, if we pursue this line of thought, here am I at the water’s edge saying all this, not quite daring to take the plunge.

But in the case of Jane O’Neill’s Bourke Street Leisure Centre, currently on at Void_, it’s literally true. You walk up the two flights of stairs to the gallery, enter the door and, splash!, there it is, three lanes of a swimming pool rendered in polyester and cotton on denim on one wall and on the other side of the small room, across two walls, the words “AQUA PROFONDA”, again on top of a shiny series of slightly differently coloured blue denim rectangles.

The work is based on the famous Fitzroy Baths, which opened in 1908 up on Alexandra Parade near the Fitzroy Markets, and like all public swimming pools has those thin black lines with Ts at the top to keep people in their lanes and has the uniquely misspelt Italian words for “DEEP WATER” up at the deep end of the pool, intended to stop little kids who can’t swim jumping in. (Of course, it kind of begs the question whether some young child who can’t yet swim can actually read, let alone read Italian, but we will let that pass. The words were apparently painted on the tiles some time back in the 1950s during post-War migration, and have now become an ironic reminder in uber-hip Fitzroy of the inward-lookingness of Anglo Australia back then and the words have never been erased.)

At the top of each of the panels containing the words “AQUA PROFONDA” there is a small black tip, almost as though they were the beginning of a lane, and across the other side there are the vertical lines topped with a T, as though it were the other side of the pool, so that across the five metres of so of the gallery is condensed the fifty metres of the Fitzroy Baths. With the result that—and, of course, I’m exaggerating, doing my art-historical laps—as our eyes move back and forth across the gallery, it’s as though we are swimming and the air has somehow turned into water. And very cleverly, if one looks closely, we can see that O’Neill has made Deep Water (2025) with a slightly darker denim blue than Seam by Seam I, II and III (2025), exactly to evoke the different “depths” of the two works.

Actually, one of the loveliest things about the works are the slightly different blues O’Neill stitches together to make each of them. In fact, she’s been making swimming pools for a while. Back in 1998 for the Fortitude Gallery in Brisbane she made On Your Blocks, in which a bunch of blue and white tiles running up the walls of the gallery imitated the laneways of a pool (and there is a well-known public swimming pool at Fortitude Valley in Brisbane, swimmable for about eleven months of the year, unlike any of the ones in Melbourne, that she was undoubtedly alluding to). But O’Neill soon abandoned ceramic tiles because when her work was taken down she was troubled by the waste she left behind. In 2014 after moving to Melbourne she held a show at Melbourne’s Living Museum of the West in Maribyrnong, in which she simply marked out the lanes of a pool in blue chalk, but as opposed to the tiles she found the chalk too fragile, crumbly, fugitive, coming off from the floor as people walked across it (and, yes, there are all kinds of allusions to Carl Andre’s tiles in this).

In the meantime, O’Neill had started working in fabric and textiles and increasingly found herself drawn to denim. At first, she used recycled op-shop denim, which made it difficult to get the full range of blues she needed, but she has now formed a relationship with a denim company in Fitzroy and uses their left-overs. A good example of the recent work she has been making is Aquanation (2023), as part of her exhibition Midway Parade, held at Void_ in 2024, in which a series of slightly darker blues meander down a panel made up of lighter blue, like streams joining up to make a river or, indeed, the lane markings of a swimming pool seen under tilting and rocking water.

And it is exactly this range of dark and light tones that O’Neill exploits so well in Bourke Street Leisure Centre, with slightly differently coloured denim patches sewn together to produce a beautiful shimmering effect, exactly like light falling across the rippling water of a swimming pool. But also—and this is how the works become painterly—across the tessellation there is also a kind of push and pull of depth, with one’s eye bobbing up and down between the comparative flatness and depth of the lighter and darker blues. “AQUA PROFONDA” is not all equally deep—and, of course, in a witty contradiction, it looks shallow hanging down a gallery wall, just like those horizontal lanes now rise vertically like a cross (and, for those who know their McCahon, they are exactly like his Tau Crosses of the 1970s, alluding both to Christian salvation and the Kumara God, a Māori fertility figure).

But then, if we’re doing a deep dive into art history—I can’t help it—O’Neill’s work reminds me as much as anything of those wavering pencil grids of the Canadian-American Agnes Martin. We could babble on endlessly about the way Martin is the heroine of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay “Grids” and the repetition of the grid is the secret driver of modern art, like all those repeated laps in the pool, but better to tell an actual story involving the famously irascible Martin and swimming pools. According to her biographer Nancy Princenthal, when Martin was living in Galisteo in New Mexico in the late 1970s: “Still devoted in these years to swimming—which she ultimately supported more as a patron than a participant—she built a pool near her house for local children, but filled it in when ‘someone irked her.’” So maybe not Martin.

And, in fact, prompted by O’Neill’s series of swimming pool works, all of us art critics have started putting our minds to swimming pools in art. My esteemed colleague Cameron Hurst, who has written a beautiful catalogue essay for O’Neill’s show, available on the Void_ website, needless to say mentions David Hockney’s long series of Hollywood swimming pools, with guys diving into the water casting about them immense showers of spray.

But the one I want to mention—and I think I win the coolness prize—is mid-century English painter Leon Kossoff’s Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon (1971), in which in his characteristic thickly impastoed style (he’s the one Ben Quilty channels when he does the same thing) he paints his local pool teeming with children, even though it’s probably one of those fairly chilly English autumn days.

Actually, against all the noise, splashing and sense of community of the Kossoff—and you can imagine just how many kids would be squeezed into a lane trying to do their laps— O’Neill’s pools strike us as peaceful, meditative, spiritual or religious with their cross-like verticality almost like the stained-glass windows down at the chancel end of a church. For all of the fact that we are staring down at the floor of the pool, it also seems like we are looking through a translucent window into a mysterious world beyond. (In fact, what O’Neill’s work reminds me of, at least this week, is all of those windows Alex Honnold passes as he climbs Skyscraper 101 in Taipai in that Netflix documentary.)

There’s a wonderful peacefulness to swimming laps of a pool—I try to do my twenty eight semi-regularly at the twenty-five-metre pool at Ashburton Aquatic. Your mind goes empty, your body floats gravity-free. As O’Neill suggests—and her commentators agree with her—it is like being a baby in the womb surrounded by amniotic fluids. Aqua profunda, indeed. Good thoughts come to you like standing under the shower. It’s called hypnagogia: the fact that the cleverest things pop into your head when you’re distracted and not thinking. And let’s be honest, about the only time you’re not on your phone nowadays is when you’re under water.

Brisbane-based writer Courtney Pedersen once spoke of O’Neill’s work in terms of hydro-feminism, and Cameron in her catalogue essay can’t help but compare it to the act of baptism, in which the priest splashes water over the infant’s head and intones, speaking to Whoever They Are Up There, “We use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament.”

The obvious literary match for Bourke Street Leisure Centre is the great Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water, in which a psychopathically jealous husband starts murdering his unfaithful wife’s lovers—I guess there’d be a little hint of red in the water of O’Neill’s pools in that case—and Cameron for her part mentions David Foster Wallace’s short story “Forever Overhead,” in which we follow the thoughts a depressed-sounding guy on his birthday as he is about to take a dive from the high board at his local swimming pool (and if you want the full horror, I dare you to watch Massacre at Central High, in which one of the characters is tricked into diving from the high board into an empty pool).

For my part, I’m going to go with Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, which actually features the Fitzroy Baths almost as one of the characters. Indeed, the sign up the deep end, ‘AQUA PROFONDA”, serves as a beautiful signalling of how the young couple in love are in over their heads, and the fact that it runs along the Young Street side of the Baths is Garner’s way of letting us know that it happens to all of us in our youth and we are not to judge their misbehaviours too harshly because they will wash away.

And I guess that takes us to the suitably matched Void_, temporarily renamed for the purposes of this show the Bourke Street Leisure Centre (yes, it’s actually on Bourke Street in the middle of the city). One of the things I’ve always liked about the gallery is that the way it is spelt marks the very space it stands in for: it’s not called Void, but Void_. Art is like that: opening up a space in our lives that it then fills. Or, even cleverer, it opens it up at the same time as it fills it. It makes us happy, doing away with the lack in our lives, while reminding us that this is not all there is. It’s kind of like the stitches around those denim rectangles that make up O’Neill’s work: they both help cover things over and make us want to look for what is beneath or behind their frames, what is on the other side of that wall or water.

And with that pseudo-Lacanian bit of theorising, all of us here at Memo would like to offer our respect and gratitude to artist and analyst Elizabeth Newman, whose passing leaves a gap that only she can fill.

You can all get out of the pool now. You’ve finished your laps, the first of the year. You can dry yourself off, get dressed and get on with your day. The art talk is over. Only another forty-seven laps this year. We will keep you fit.