one foot on the bottom is about childhood, or the space that childhood once occupied. Using family Kodachrome slides taken in the nineteen-fifties and sixties by her late mother Evelyn, together with her own contemporary pictures, Mary Macpherson makes a portrait of family holidays by the beach, the lake and the river. Poetic and unexpected, it places past beside present so that time folds in on itself, and the result is an evocative account of childhood, of the power of a picture, and of a national love of spending time by water.

“A kind of child-like intensity and wonder characterises much of the best work, as it does poetry. Yet there is also a sense of care, nurture and an understated delight here which could be described as parental.” — Gregory O'Brien