When Australian-born artist Judy Cotton was struck down by Lyme disease in the 1990s – having been bitten by a tick at her country home in Lyme, Connecticut – she had to find a way to create art through the crippling pain. Turning away from large gestural paintings, she grouped small panels into expansive bursts of colour for a series titled Swimmers.
Her memoir, Swimming Home, returns to the technique, telling her life story as a mosaic of fragmented memories. Cotton worked from notes collected in a drawer to craft a short, impressionistic book, the impact of which is both pungent and poignant. This is the partial portrait of an artist and a daughter shaped by family, country, and self-imposed exile, in a century of change, especially for women.
