Growing up in western Sydney, where the mercury increasingly spikes hot and sweaty, Mt Druitt artist Katerina Asistin spent summer days and annual school swim carnivals at her local swimming pool.

On the city fringes, it’s such municipal baths that offer respite in high summer. The Mt Druitt Swimming Centre is a chlorinated blue oasis among patches of grass and picnicking families, the shallow end of the 50-metre Olympic-sized pool usually thickest with swimmers.

“This will be the last season before it gets renovated to become an indoor-outdoor swimming pool, which made me want to paint it,” Asistin says. “I remember times running to the bathroom and like the concrete was super hot. Even though the shaded part was on the concrete paths, people would take picnic blankets and put them on

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