Printmaker Laura Smith had been working on a series of prints about swimming, but there are no swimmers in a recent work she submitted for a printmakers’ exhibit.

The show is called "Water’s Edge," and Smith chose to depict the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial.

"I thought ‘That’s perfect, there’s a swimming pool on the edge of the water,’" said Smith, whose work is aptly named "Closed."

"Water’s Edge" features the work of 18 artists, nine each from California and Hawaii. It is an exchange exhibit, a practice among printmakers in which each artist creates a single image and makes enough prints to share with others in the group. A set of the prints are now on display at South Street Gallery@Frame Arts Hawaii.

Smith said the ability to make more than one print of an image is one of the attractions of the art form.

"I like this method of making art where you get more than one. There’s always something you can do with these other prints, like trade them or sell them … or show them in different places."

The prints in "Water’s Edge" show a variety of water-based themes, from the serious to the whimsical.

Erika Molyneux created a lithograph that depicts a foot standing on some jellyfish. In her artist’s statement, she said the print refers to the problem of trying to avoid jellyfish while running or walking on the beach and "addresses jellyfish influxes credited to global warming, and the implications of these events on the Earth’s ecosystem."

She also named the work "Jelly Sandwich," a reference not only to jellyfish, but to Capt. Cook’s original name for the Hawaiian Islands.

Cook also provided inspiration for Elizabeth Nakoa, an art instructor of Kapiolani Community College. She created a vivid image of his ship, the HMS Resolution, in full sail.

Smith said there’s a level of mystery in the printmaking process because even though a printmaker has an idea of what the final product should look like, it doesn’t became clear until a lot of testing and trial-and-error.

"It takes a lot of time to make an edition," Smith said.

Gesturing at a print called "Water’s Edge" by local printmaker Timothy Contreras, which depicts a spray of sea water splashing against a rock, she said, "It’s just one color (various shades of gray), but still it would take a long time just to make this metal plate, and then he’d have to fiddle with it to make sure this gray was just the right lightness. … And then he’d have to print them."

Smith’s work on the Waikiki Natatorium is a woodblock print that has three main colors, blue for the water, slate gray for the building and orange-red for the gates. This provided its own complications, since Smith had to carve separate woodblocks for each color, making sure that after the canvas went through the many-staged printing process, the colors would come together like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

Smith said the process of printmaking is as intriguing as the final product.

"The actual work of it is interesting," she said. "Those woodcuts are a subtractive way of working, and I like cutting away the wood and then printing it.

"The fact that you’re never quite sure how it’s going to turn out, for me, is quite interesting. If you knew how it was going to turn out, you wouldn’t do it. So then the complicatedness of it — the several plates, the different colors — that adds to that part."