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Pool Diaries
Nick Smith -
RHODES
65 Great Portland Street
London, W1W 7LW
10 July - 1 august 2026
OPENING RECEPTION:
THURSDAY 9. july 6 - 8pm
RHODES is pleased to present Pool Diaries, a new body of work by Nick Smith.
Developed from Smith’s ongoing exploration of swimming pools, the exhibition captures the bright, cinematic atmosphere surrounding pool culture and the aspirational worlds that gather around it. Across 14 original works, pools emerge not simply as sites of leisure, but as carefully constructed environments suspended somewhere between architecture, ritual, performance and temporary escape.
Each of the collage works listed are unique originals, each in bespoke framing with UV protective glass.
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Artworks
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"The June triptych (13th, 15th and 17th) was conceived as a sequence of closely related works: square compositions of mid-century backyard pools sharing a common architectural language while differing subtly in light, colour and atmosphere. Together they form a study in repetition and variation, where the familiar becomes newly observed. At the centre of each composition is the dive: perhaps the purest ritual in pool life. There is a brief moment after take-off when there is no turning back, suspended between air and water, certainty and surprise. The diver never sees the dive itself, only its memory and aftermath. For me, the first dive of the day remains the most compelling of all… that brief moment before impact when the water is still an unknown."
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"Diary of a Flamingo marked a change within the Pool Diaries series. Earlier works drew upon public pools and hotels, with their rotating cast of strangers and pleasing unpredictability. Here, the setting shifted to a private pool… a more controlled environment that seemed to offer less. As it turned out, less could be remarkably generous. With fewer distractions, attention drifted to shifting light, melting ice, dragonflies, lipstick marks, and the small absurdities of leisure. Suspended within a vast field of blue, the flamingo becomes both subject and interruption, equal parts geometry and pool toy. Over the course of the day, it acquires an imagined personality until, against all odds, a piece of pink plastic starts to feel like company."
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"Beverly Hills returns to the pool that inspired my first pool diary work, created for Miami Art Week at Untitled Art Fair in 2025. If swimming pools have personalities, the Beverly Hills Hotel pool has spent decades perfecting its own. Across the day, attendants test the water, loungers are aligned by fractions, stories circulate with questionable accuracy, and glamour arrives reassuringly late. Throughout it all, a single leaf drifts stubbornly across the surface, quietly refusing to follow the script. The pool absorbs everything: gossip, photographs, sequins, arguments over shades of pink. By morning, it has reset itself entirely, immaculate once more, as though none of it had ever happened."
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"Palm Springs takes its cue from the famous Kaufmann House pool, immortalised by Slim Aarons and now lodged somewhere deep within the collective imagination of Californian leisure. I have never visited the pool myself, which seemed a rather poor reason not to spend an entire day there. Across the work, breakfast drifts into lunch, lunch into drinks, and drinks into the sort of evening where someone inevitably ends up in the water fully clothed. A small cluster of yellow flowers offers a nod to Aarons’ original photograph, proof that sometimes the difference between a swimming pool and a myth is simply good composition."
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"June 2nd marked a return to the twenty-four-hour format, with each colour chip representing a minute of the day: 1,440 observations unfolding across twenty-four rows. Written poolside over the course of a full day in Palm Springs, the work demanded an unusual restraint, with each hourly entry compressed into precisely sixty words. Friends arrived and departed, bottles were opened, conversations drifted, and the rhythms of leisure slowly gave way to evening and then night. Of all the details gathered that day, one remained unusually persistent: a woman swimming lengths wearing a red cap, moving quietly through the blue like a pin fixed to a noticeboard of ideas."
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"Paradise follows an inflatable flamingo through 728 minutes beside the pool, from early morning inflation to gradual evening deflation. Across the day it drifts through use, sunlight and neglect while the pool remains calm and indifferent throughout. What begins as a novelty slowly acquires the status of a character. A single gold leaf eye gives the flamingo a wink as the viewer walks past, briefly suggesting that it might be looking back."
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"Icebergs was created following a day spent at Bondi Icebergs on 19th February 2026. We visited on a Thursday, after the Wednesday night clearing of sand from the pool, when the famous basin was at its most photogenic. I observed the day first from the restaurant above, inventing stories for swimmers below, and later from within the pool itself, moving amongst them. Across twelve hours, disciplined dawn swimmers gave way to tourists, influencers, families and post-work regulars, each inhabiting the same water in entirely different ways. By evening, the cast had changed completely, while the pool itself had quietly restored its composure, as though none of us had ever been there at all."
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"96 Pools is both travel guide and wish list: a catalogue of ninety-six swimming pools gathered from memory, aspiration and image culture. Some are places I have swum in myself, while others have been borrowed unapologetically from the pages of Condé Nast Traveller and Architectural Digest. Each pool is represented by a single colour, drawn either from the water itself or the environment it occupies. The overall composition echoes the familiar geometry of the municipal pools of my childhood: orderly, rectangular and lane-based, though the pools contained within are anything but ordinary. Together they form a colour chart of aquatic pursuit."
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"Red Lounger and Yellow Ring are abstract aerial compositions built from the simple geometry and saturated colours of pool life. Stripped of narrative and reduced to their essential forms, they draw upon the pleasing visual language of primary colours often found around swimming pools. In both works, a lone swimmer occupies the water while an object waits nearby: a red lounger in one, a yellow ring in the other. I like the sense of anticipation they create. The swimmer is already in the water, but the object remains unused."
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"PARADISE is less a lightbox... more a portal. Scaled to the body and glowing somewhere between sea and sky, it evokes that point where white sand meets warm water and everyday concerns dissolve. I have always found the edge where sand meets the sea deeply restorative, and this work attempts to bottle some small part of that feeling. Stand before it long enough and it begins to function as a kind of paradise light therapy, offering temporary relief from weather, routine and reality itself."
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