Honey Long & Prue Stent, Touching Pool installation view, 2020. Courtesy: the artists and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.

ARC ONE Gallery presents Touching Pool, a highly anticipated solo exhibition by one of Australia’s leading artist collaborations, Honey Long & Prue Stent. Inspired by the touching pool often found at aquariums and the sensorial connections with nature they elicit, this exhibition speaks to the conflicted and estranged relationship we have with the natural world. Using a pared down visual language of colour, texture, and form, Touching Pool captures performative encounters between the artists’ own bodies and the natural environment, primarily bodies of water.

In these works, submerged bodies writhe, dance, bend and twist into organic matter while materials used by the artists such as shimmering transparent fabrics, wax, glass and netting, blend and merge the body and landscape. Zoomed-in, tightly cropped, abstracted, and enveloped, bodies become creaturely while aquatic animals, riverbeds and rock formations evoke human forms, revealing sights/sites of commonality and connection that “sing to each other”.

ARC One Gallery is has now re-opened to the public and is practising social distancing measures.