Heather B. Swann

Over the past three decades, artist Heather B. Swann has dredged the depths of what it means–and feels like–to be human. Best known as a sculptor who thinks and works across painting and drawing, as well as, more recently, video and performance, Swann examines an inner world–the emotional or psycho-spiritual realm–in order to reveal and revel in the phenomena of being alive.

In the multifarious installation Last night on Earth (2024), drawings, paintings and sculptures sit in spatial and poetic relationships to one another. Vast painterly pools are inverted in the glass globes of The Moth (2023) which are, in turn, echoed in the penetrating vision of Charon (2023). As a physical object that portrays a void, Charon is a silhouette–a recurring motif across Swann’s work that embodies both presence and absence, and positive and negative space. At nearly three metres wide, The long rock (2018) is another hybrid curiosity. Neither animal nor human, featuring an upholstered torso and bowing legs, it materialises a yearning of ‘wanting to stay, wanting to go’.[1] Swann not only moves easily between mediums, but the objects and images themselves exist between states. They delve intuitively into the unknown: ‘The recognition that we are mysterious to ourselves is the driving force for me as an artist.’[2]

Drawing is also a pillar of Swann’s practice, both as a powerful medium unto itself and as a method for materialising works into being. As curator Beatrice Gralton describes, it is a ‘process through which [Swann] solves problems and makes sense of the ideas (texts, histories, materials, mythologies, life experiences) and shapes (figurative, landscape, abstracted) that inform her sculptures.’[3] Things there is no one to tell (2024) expands on Swann’s diaristic approach to drawing, pulling from her studio archive of studies, preparatory and finished works, and notebooks. The mercurial imagery and text form a visual taxonomy of unspoken thoughts and unfulfilled actions, as if–like the title suggests–Swann is whispering into the void.

[1] Heather B. Swann quoted by José Da Silva, Inner Sanctum | 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2024, p185.

[2] Heather B. Swann in ‘Heather B. Swann | Oh lover, hold me close’, video.

[3] Beatrice Gralton, ‘Heather B. Swann: The Heart of the Myth;, Vault, issue 36, republished by Union Magazine.

A signature of Swann’s work is its surrealist tendencies. In HeavyHead (2016) in AGSA’s permanent collection, for example, we are confronted by an object that is familiar yet foreign. A bulky black body, resembling a sheep, is confounded by the fact that its face and hooves are wheels. It has been de-identified, no longer part of its herd and made to perennially graze the gallery floor. Swann’s uncanny combination of forms, alongside her unusual material choices like faux fur in place of wool, prompts us to extrapolate on who this creature might be: is it lost; where is it going; why is it alone? For Swann, this tension between abstraction and representation is a tool of artistic divination and reveals pathos–the inevitable tragedy of life.[1]

Similalrly, Swann’s wearable sculptures of enormous dark and brooding Banksia Men are inspired by the natural world, and the wicked characters from tales by the Australian children’s author May Gibbs. The title Banksia Men comes from the children’s’ stories of May Gibbs, where the big bad Banksia Men are the villains of the Gumnut stories and are based on the appearance of aged Banksia “cones” – dark, hairy, knobbly, many-eyed creatures. They are always hatching wicked plots to capture the Nuts and Blossoms and Mr Lizard is their greatest enemy. The looming, grey figures who stand clustered in a darkened room at AGSA are the stuff of children’s nightmares!

[1] Heather B. Swann, interviewed by Jaimi Wright in ‘In the Studio: Heather B Swann’, Art Almanac, 27 Feburary 2023.