Marty St. James
Marty St. James (born 1954) is a British performance artist and a professor of fine art at the University of Hertfordshire. He is best known for The Swimmer, a multi‑channel video portrait of Olympic swimmer Duncan Goodhew. Commissioned in 1990 by the National Portrait Gallery, The Swimmer has since migrated to new digital formats.
He studied at Bournville College of Art. HTV Television recorded and presented his graduation piece, Mr and Mrs (1976), with his then wife Mary. This piece and his early life are discussed in the Guardian article Mr and Mrs Avant Garde: art's real-life couples.
The Swimmer is considered a seminal moment in video art, using time and fragmentation with analogue technology from 1990. Its site-sensitive, sculptural installation practices foreshadow later developments in video installation. St. James describes his work as “sculpture in time,” with multi‑channel video installations that capture a subject in a “sliver of time”—moving yet frozen, shaped by the technology needed to present it.
St. James is a member of the Centre for Research in Electronic Art and Communication within the Fine Art Practices Group. In 1984 he contributed to Video Art: the Early Years with a performance for the British/Canadian Video Exchange, A Space / ARC, in Toronto.
In 2007 The Swimmer was added to the National Portrait Gallery’s primary collection. The gallery also holds video portraits of Julie Walters and Sally Burgess in its reference collection. St. James was a judge in the art category for the UK‑Japan Art Design Film Award in 2010. In 2012 he had a second exhibition in China at the Iron Curtain Gallery.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:46 (CET).