To have readers take in a story slowly, sideways, instead of through our easy screen-based scrollings down through text.” I wanted also to find out what would happen if I brought these older, Eastern rhythms, forms and practices to what is a difficult, distracted time in Western society. Shadrick describes the extraordinary form of the Wild Patience scrolls as an attempt to “play with the private in public….to combine the male energy of the ancient Japanese poets like Bashō, who travelled the countryside writing from nature, with the more intimate art of pillow books as kept by their female contemporaries. These lines from poet Adrienne Rich underpinned her endeavour: ‘Freedom is daily, prosebound, routine remembering’ and ‘A wild patience has carried me this far.’ The artist, a former hospice life-story scribe, offered herself as the pool’s genius loci: a spirit of place, quietly inviting swimmers and sunbathers to think about freedom and the importance of routines, creative as well as physical. Could it be done? What might it do to my life if I tried?” the cure for sleepįor two summers, Shadrick knelt beside England’s oldest lido – Pells Pool in Lewes – to write a mile on scrolls of paper that, at 150ft, were as long as the pool. Outside the fenced enclosure into disrepute. Making an exhibition of myself. What Mother said I must never, ever do. To be a woman in middle age, taking up space, claiming attention. A mile of writing composed pen on paper on 5 x 150ft scrolls, inviting onlookers to describe when they felt most wild and free supported by Pells Pool, Lewes, and the Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland as featured by Radio 4, Oh Comely and the Outdoor Swimming Society project photography by Steve Creffield

A wild patience adrienne rich