In 2015, Carmen Winant wrote an essay for the art journal Carla exploring how athletic practice, much like an artist’s, is often flattened, and thought of as just training rather than the “thousands of hours spent repeating gruelling tests to build strength, skillfulness, and endurance”.

Winant argues that the stake of an artist’s life, like that of an athlete, is a timeless ritual of repetition. “Practice is the perennial state of being almost there, the great anti-climax,” she writes. “The artist [is] forever making, searching, rehearsing, and confronting impossible and often laborious problems.”

Like Winant – a competitive distance runner before she was an artist – Dani Leal played sport, in her case volleyball, from age 11 before a coach sabotaged her love for the game nine years later. Then, the pull towards a creative life in photography became increasingly necessary. “I was an athlete, first and foremost,” says Leal. “That was my path. Photography was this other thing I knew I was good at but never something that I thought about doing seriously.”