SPORTS SPACES

Whether enjoying a knock-up on a tennis court, playing football, lifting weights at the gym, or simply going for a swim, recreational sports are commonly understood as leisure pursuits — activities associated with enjoyment, relaxation, and escape from the pressures of work and everyday responsibilities.

Despite this sense of freedom, recreational sports are often shaped by systems of regulation and control. Taking place within carefully designed environments, governed by rules, routines, and specialised equipment, these activities reveal subtle structures of discipline embedded within spaces intended for leisure.

Sports Spaces explores this tension through the photographic examination of recreational sporting environments. Balancing the formal qualities of shapes, lines, and architectural structures — used as metaphors for discipline and control — against the atmospheric qualities of colour and light as symbols of release and escape, the photographs present sporting spaces as environments where discipline and dreaminess coexist in a peculiar yet poetic harmony.