1988 Swimmers in Space 1 & 2

In the summer of 1987 to 1988 Dibble completed a four-month residency at The Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt. At the end of the residency an exhibition of the work he had completed was shown at The Dowse, titled “From Fire and Water”. The exhibition marked a departure for Dibble, with most of the sculptures in the show using a new technical method of working, in which metal sheets were cut and folded into various configurations. As a group they became known as “The Foldings”.

As part of the terms of the residency, a large work was made specifically for The Dowse, scaled from a small model. This work, Swimmers in Space, features two swimmers seen in profile.

Swimmers interested Dibble in this period. Steel swimmers had been a part of many of his large installations in the late 1980s and, when he began his larger bronze works in the year after The Dowse residency, his first two studies were of swimmers.

Swimmers in Space was mounted outside The Dowse until the building’s refurbishment in 2007. For a time, the work was re-installed on the Myrtle Street side of The Dowse, but was subsequently taken down and is now in storage.