HEATHER B. SWANN

Heather B. Swann’s work is at once figurative and abstract, its animal and human imagery expressed in refined formal organisation and sensual curvature. Handsome, human-scaled and carefully-finished, her sculptures have a charm and luxuriousness that initially calls to mind the furniture-creatures of Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. However, Swann’s variously stretched, twisted and otherwise manipulated birds, beasts and bodies also have a darker quality, a dreamlike, shape-shifting ambiguity.

Like the spoon-shoe that the poet Andre Breton and the sculptor Alberto Giacometti found in a Paris flea market, or Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon (Object: Luncheon in fur, 1936), these works are uncanny surrealist hybrids, colliding and commingling different dimensions and qualities of experience. Swann’s practice is informed by a strong ethic of making, of the hand, and she draws inspiration and example from the artisanal traditions of prehistoric, classical, medieval and folk art. In her sculptures there is a clear sense of cultural continuity, even of deja -vu, as the works’ weirdness, eroticism, anger or whimsy adheres to the familiar forms of practical things: furniture, tools, utensils, vessels. More significantly, Swann’s commitment to the material and technical disciplines of carving, modelling and tailoring produces sculptures which are original, singular, solid, irreducible ‘things-in-the-world’. Previously unimagined, once made and seen they become an integral, unforgettable part of the visible, tangible universe.

Heather has received a number of important awards and commissions that include the prestigious Paul Guest Drawing Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo in 2014; Goddard Sapin-Jaloustre Scholarship, France in 2005 and the Rosamund McCulloch Scholarship, University of Tasmania, Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (1998). Heather B. Swann’s work is held in numerous prominent private and public collections such as: the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Artbank, Dubbo Regional Gallery, Latrobe University, Melbourne and the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria.

Text courtesy Karen Woodbury Fine Art