CHILDREN OF ANOTHER AGE

One artist who might have been considered for the Heide show is Jennifer Plunkett, whose exhibition at Roar studios has an insight into the way children behave at, and in, a suburban swimming pool.

Plunkett explores the first tentative plunge, the group lesson, bobbing heads and watery shimmer. You can almost smell the chlorine.

Her drawing is sharp; she gets just the right automatic gesture of a girl twitching down the elastic as it rides up. The watercolours work much better than the oils, perhaps because Plunkett treats them less tightly.

Best of these is an infant’s introduction to water, where the child’s face peers around at blurring heads in an alien element.

There’s a Dufy-ish charm about some of her watercolours; she locks the drier oils into a horizontal-vertical lattice of small strokes, and in these the action is more frozen than fluid.

Plunkett is at pains to follow the human rituals and dramas into the changing rooms as well as the pool. This is  a sensitive exhibition, well made, well observed.