Louise Schmid: Swimming Aid
Until May 7; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

“You went astray among the mysterious plants of the sea-bed”, wrote Iain Crichton Smith, “in the green half-light without love”. His Gaelic poem, Tha Thu Air Aigeann m’Inntinn, paints a vivid picture of the dim and watery depths of the unconscious mind, where memories float out of reach, enmeshed in seaweed.

The poem comes back to me as I look at the dream-like paintings and drawings of Louise Schmid at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Water is everywhere, in swimming pools, piped through tubes, in the vast ocean and in chunky baths. Structures both industrial and organic grow out of the blue surface, receding far into the distance. Shapes shift, and objects float like nouns which have been separated from their verbs.

Schmid, Swiss-born and Glasgow-based, cites as her inspiration John Cheever’s short story, The Swimmer. Starring Burt Lancaster, the film was a hit in 1968, and this year’s remake will see Alec Baldwin in the lead role.

The hero of this American classic swims across his suburban neighbourhood, scampering from pool to pool and encountering a string of socialites along the way. The sad realities of his life, which he manages to suppress from day to day, are gradually revealed to the swimmer through his underwater journey.

A similar metaphor is at work in Trainspotting, when Ewan McGregor is swallowed by a dirty toilet bowl to swim in a short-lived wash of bliss. Whether in Crichton Smith’s sea, Cheever’s pool or Irvine Welsh’s sewer, the swimmer is diving deep into his own unconscious mind, releasing the dreams and nightmares which are hidden from the light of day.

This is the dream-like state of Schmid’s paintings. Towering shapes repeat themselves in different disguises, here a baroque, scaled creature, and there a diving board with beak and feather head-dress. Growing and shrinking, they shape-shift like hallucinations. Water lies at the base of everything, as something elemental and fundamental out of which creatures and structures rise like visions from the unconscious mind.

The regular appearance of dainty shoes adds a touch of fairytale romance. Severed body-parts float frequently across the picture plane without stepping once into the realm of nightmares.

Whether Schmid’s motifs are consciously symbolic, or just the stuff of recurring dreams, is not clear. The evidence of abandoned and redundant pencil lines suggests that the artist is making it up as she goes along. In other words, these might be automatic drawings, released without premeditation from the artist’s own watery depths.

Reality is definitely suspended; swimming pools and other man-made structures recede into contradictory vanishing points, as can only happen in a dream. Harold Nono’s subtle background music, with its drip, drip of water and a hint of Twin Peaks, adds to the gentle reverie.

And it is gentle. Puckered bits of paper bear densely-worked marks which are humble rather than pompous, flawed instead of perfect. The delicate accumulation of objects, never far from the surface of the image, owe something to Japanese art.

What really sets Schmid apart from the crowd is her seductive use of colour. Even the slightest drawings are rich and textured in veils of accumulated luminosity, leaving the imprint on your mind of something magical, imagined, and vivid. Azure blue and coal black, these are pools you’ll want to dive into.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.04.05