Swim #4

The fourth issue of Swim, titled Found, is centered on the theme of discovery, it explores how the act of finding shapes artistic creation or becomes an art form in itself. This idea is playfully embodied in its interactive scratchcard cover—echoing Peter Evans’s scratchcard paintings featured within.

Issue 04 investigates notions of ‘found’. From our initial musings on Found Art – a term originally coined by Marcel Duchamp and epitomised by his famous Fountain sculpture – we then became interested in how the act of finding can be incorporated into various works of art and artistic mediums. Moving past the original definition, which refers primarily to found household objects (think Tracey Emin’s My Bed and Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone), we began looking at work where the human subject is the found object; work that requires the viewer to do the finding as opposed to the artist; and work in which the very process of searching and finding is the art itself.

The cover for this issue continues our investigation of the found, taking the form of a functioning scratchcard that invites the viewer to uncover its hidden secrets by scratching away the special ink. This is also a play on the featured project of one of our contributors to this issue, Peter Evans, whose paintings are inspired by found scratchcards that have been reclaimed from the pavements of London.

Other contributing artists to this issue include Leslie Hewitt, Max Siedentopf, Penelope Umbrico, Jeff Mermelstein, King Owusu, Khadija Saye, Claire Douglass, Marguerite Bornhauser, Sally Gabori, Sam Hutchinson, Lucia Hierro, Kirico Ueda, Sophia Wohleke, Joy Gregory, Karl Ohiri, Kensuke Koiki, Thomas Sauvin, Centre Centre Books, Alicia Gistn, and Sarah Elwen. Essays have been contributed by Andrew Hunt, Ellen Harris, Arthur Davies-Evitt, and Thom Corbishley.