Shallow Pool Illusion

Rachel Mackay

15 July - 23 August 2026

Shallow Pool Illusion takes its title from an optical phenomenon in which submerged objects appear closer to the surface than they really are. The illusion produces a discrepancy between appearance and reality, generated by the refraction of light as it passes through water.

In this work, a mouth hovers at the waterline – the boundary between reality and illusion. Below this threshold, the mouth becomes softened and magnified. Water refracts, distorts, stretches and blurs. Acting as both lens and medium, it transforms the subject into a shifting field of colour. Refraction performs a kind of alchemy.

There is a certain pleasure in this space, an allure in this kind of illusion. Resting between representation and abstraction, solidity and fluidity, the mind may welcome a departure from an agreed-upon reality.

The mouth, as subject, holds multiple inferences. It is a site of sustenance and sound, consumption and expulsion – breathing, eating, smiling, singing, kissing, screaming, sucking, laughing, licking. A signifier of sexuality and an instrument of instruction. Removed from its usual context, it becomes a strange landscape: a form both familiar and unsettling.

The work considers perception as something continually mediated through matter and subjectivity. The shallow pool illusion produces a suspended state that suggests reality has become altered or clouded, but does this distortion reveal something else? The distorted image may, paradoxically, hold a different kind of truth.