Saturday 29th July, 2023

Swimming a Long Way Together was in Dover, July 2023. Vanessa worked with Future Foundry to present a new public art event which coincided with the opening of Dover Museum’s ‘Channel Crossings’ exhibition.

An aerial photograph of Mercedes on her ‘vindication swim’, in the English Channel. Taken by The Times, 21 October 1027. (News UK).

On 7 October 1927 Mercedes Gleitze became the second woman and the first British woman to swim the English Channel. She successfully completed the crossing on her eighth attempt, setting out from Cap Gris-Nez in France and arriving into England between St Margaret’s Bay and the South Foreland, close to Dover.

Almost 100 years on from Mercedes’ breakthrough swim, on Saturday 29th July Swimming a Long Way Together created an event that celebrated Mercedes Gleitze, the spectacle that often surround her swimming feats and the town’s prestigious history as the home of English Channel swimming.

This coincided with the launch of Dover Museum’s new temporary exhibition ‘Channel Crossings’, which will be open to the public until spring 2024. The Channel Crossings exhibition features Vanessa’s film work ‘At Home in the Water’, first shown in Brighton in 2022, which conveys what it feels like to be a long distance swimmer out in the ocean for hours on end. The exhibition also features a ‘swimming’ ceramic work made through public art workshops in partnership with ceramic art Dover.

Programme of Events:

10am: DJ Aarron Monaco and singer Finley Guy at Swimmers’ Beach on Dover Seafront
11am: Family workshop to create a shoal of fish for the procession at the Marina Curve, Dover
1.15pm: ‘The swimmer’s journey’ procession along the seafront, accompanied by a performance by Ceylan Hay
3.30pm Opening Ceremony of the ‘Channel Crossings’ exhibition at the Dover Museum in the Market Square, with music from local singers ‘Terravoces’
4.30pm: Talk by Anna Maria Mullally on the overlooked feminist history of sea swimming focusing on Mercedes Gleitze and early female Channel pioneers

*Doloranda Pember (2019), In the Wake of Mercedes Gleitze, The History Press, p.55