Lucy Clout’s ‘Warm Bath’ is a home movie. It is a looping fiction telling two interlocking stories. The first, a group of seven women, each obsessed with the movement of water within their shared, UPVC and mildew, North London house. The second, a man who films a particular drainage ditch twice a day, every day, in the sunny Southern Californian endoergic basin. The video begins as an investigation into the desire to record the unremarkable passing of time and becomes a looking-based experiment in permanence, place, leaky systems and intimacy.

‘Warm Bath’ documents structures by which people maintain themselves – physically, socially and via repetition/routine. We see the prosaic economic relationship that is a house-share: necessarily impermanent, a place of continual constructional negotiation. It’s a practical, provisional agreement between themselves: a structure that functionally understands it’s own instability.

Through the nauseating repetitive movement of the individual hand, Clout shows one-sided stories of comfort, attachment and joining in.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28006