Dryden Goodwin: Poised

Under the intense gaze of perfection-seeking coaches, the hypnotic rhythms of a young female team in training at the Crystal Palace Diving Club are captured in artist Dryden Goodwin’s new video, Poised. The film was conceived after a series of conversations with dance scientist Elsa Bradley, who specializes in the psychology of “flow” observed in elite athletes trying to optimize their performance. Observing the team in practice over a three-month period, Goodwin used extreme close-ups of their bodies set against oblique atmospheric details of the pool to frame the divers’ routine. Explains Goodwin: “I wanted to illuminate their intensity of focus and moments of idealized grace, and construct imaginative spaces in the mind’s eye of the viewer, both with the physical space and the implied emotional space between the trainers and divers.” Poised debuts today in Everything Flows: The Art of Getting in the Zone, a group exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, exploring the relationship between mind and performance through newly commissioned film works conceived with leading athletes and scientists, including pole vaulter and Olympic hopeful Kate Dennison.