Nick Smith’s Pool Diaries: a day beside the pool at RHODES

Nick Smith’s Pool Diaries brought fourteen works to RHODES in London for a public run from 10 July to 1 August 2026. The opening gathering took place a day earlier, on 9 July from 6–8pm. That distinction matters to the exhibition’s history: the artist’s early announcement called 9 July the opening, while his subsequent invitation identified it as the private view. The gallery’s exhibition record gives the public dates. RHODES exhibition; Artist’s private-view invitation.

From pictures to diaries

The project grew from eighteen months of attention to swimming pools and the behaviour surrounding them. In his June announcement, Smith described a geography stretching from Palm Springs to Bondi, combining places he had visited with settings encountered through photographs and imagination. The pool becomes a framework for observing how people occupy leisure time. Because those settings have different origins, the show should not be read as a straightforward travel diary or a claim that every scene records an experience witnessed in person. Artist’s announcement.

Smith’s July account explains a consequential change in the making of the series. He initially began writing diary entries to supply text for pictures of pools; the writing then became central to the work. His attention settled on peripheral incidents and recurring habits rather than a sequence of spectacular holiday moments. A floating ring, a conversation travelling across water or a repeated gesture could become material. Read together, these observations suggest an exhibition concerned with how attention gives ordinary time a shape. Artist’s account of the project.

The gallery identifies June 2nd as a particularly literal structure for that idea: its colour chips correspond to the minutes of a complete twenty-four-hour day. Diary of a Flamingo follows an inflatable through another day beside a pool. Their shared subject is therefore temporal as well as architectural. Looking at the scene supplies one level of information; reading its sequence supplies another. Smith’s established interplay between an image legible at a distance and text encountered close up gives that distinction a physical viewing logic. Exhibition context; Smith’s image-and-text practice.

A project before its London showing

Pool Diaries also has a history before this London presentation. RHODES dates the series’ first introduction to Untitled Art, Miami Beach in 2025, while tracing Smith’s longer engagement with swimming-pool imagery to his 2015 reworking of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash. The 2026 show assembled a developed body of work around Smith’s own observational narratives. It was a new London exhibition, rather than the first appearance of the series. RHODES on the series’ development.

The related Paradise print reached the London Original Print Fair in May, before the July exhibition. Its earlier release helps locate Pool Diaries within an unfolding project, but does not establish a July launch date for the exhibition’s individual works. The exhibition calendar and the circulation of related editions tell connected but different parts of the project’s history. Paradise release announcement.