Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

Shapton's book is part autobiography part art. As a young girl she followed her brother into swimming and became an elite swimmer, her career culminating in taking part in the 1988 and 1992 Canadian Olympic Trials. Although her time as an athlete is over she speaks in her book of how her dreams are still of the endless round of land and water training, trials, competitions, training camps, early mornings and long distance journeys, of teammates, coaches, food and the sights and sounds of the pool. She speaks with eloquent sadness of her memories of that obsessional driven time and her life in the present day still driven by the urge to swim. 

Shapton illustrates her text with pictures which achingly express the weave of her life in ways text cannot. Fourteen blobs of colour are fourteen odours expressing the scents of her life: a teammates hair, parka hem, pillow and coach. There are obsessive dark outlines of the pools Shapton has swum in, photographs of every swimsuit she has ever owned and where they were worn, her father's collection of Studebaker cars, and watercolour portraits of swimmers and teammates. Shapton has idiosyncratically chronicled a lifetime relationship with the water in a unique way.