Portfolio 6 – The Pool Abstractions – Introduction

The Pool Abstractions transforms the mundane infrastructure of recreational swimming into a meditation on light, memory, and perception. Through eight experimental photo montages, the series dissolves the boundary between documentation and pure visual experience, asking us to see the familiar as though for the first time—or perhaps as we’ve always felt it but never quite articulated.

Working with extreme defocus, layered transparencies, and chromatic collision, these images evoke the sensory experience of being in and around water: the refraction of sunlight through rippling surfaces, the disorientation of submersion, the interplay between the body’s weight and water’s buoyancy. Yet they transcend their aquatic origins to become something more universal—studies in how we process beauty, how color carries emotion, how abstraction can feel more truthful than representation.

The portfolio moves through distinct emotional registers. Early pieces establish a vocabulary of geometric planes and translucent overlays, evoking contemplative depth. Mid-series works introduce circular forms and linear rhythms that suggest movement and transformation. Later images venture into moodier, more introspective territory with the introduction of violet and magenta, before returning to geometric clarity with newfound sophistication. Throughout, a consistent palette of turquoise, coral, sage, golden yellow, and navy creates coherence while allowing for surprising variations.

What emerges is neither purely documentary nor entirely abstract, but something richer: a visual language for the liminal space between seeing and feeling. These are images that ask to be experienced rather than decoded—invitations to surrender to pure sensation, to remember what it feels like to be weightless, suspended, dissolved in light.