Heather B. Swann

This monologue by Heather B. Swann is well worth a watch- a good introduction before you come and see our current show by the Artist.




Heather B. Swann will run until Saturday the 21st of September at Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne at Level 1/167 Flinders Lane. You will find us on the corner of Hosier Lane and Flinders Lane.

Please contact the gallery on (03) 9639 5855 or info@kwgallery.com for further information

Karen Woodbury Gallery is back

After a long 18 months toiling away behind the scenes we are excited to announce that we are now open for business at our new and very central Flinders Lane Gallery Space.
We feel very blessed to be housed in such a unique and historic building...not to mention the fantastic tenants we share with such as e.g.etal, Zambesi and Ashtanga Yoga Melbourne.

Our hard work paid off with Tuesday night's opening celebration bringing in a huge crowd. Thank you everyone who attended for making this such a special night. Fun was had by all. 

Our first exhibition is by Heather B. Swann and will run from the 21st August until the 21st of September. In our second gallery space you will find a selection of Karen Woodbury Gallery artists on display.

Heather B. Swann, Bachelor 2013, wood, paper, resin, pigment, binder & marble dust, 110.0 x 110.0 x 750.0 cm

We are very excited to welcome new and familiar faces into our beautiful new space. Karen Woodbury Gallery is open from Tuesday through to Sunday from 11 am until 5pm. There is no need to make an appointment except if you wish to see us after hours.

You will find us at Level 1, 167 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. You can contact us on (03) 9639 5855 or info@kwgallery.com



 

Heather B. Swann @ The Substation

You only have a few days left to see Heather B. Swann's enigmatic sculpture included in the exhibition
"Stories from the city, stories from the sea,
queer urban tales"
at The Substation in Newport.

The exhibitions closes Saturday 25th February.

For more info see here

Heather B. Swann in Rome

Heather B. Swann is currently undertaking an Australia Council residency in Rome. While away, Heather is included in a group exhibition 'Seven things to do in an emergency', that runs from 13 - 21 December, at the British School, Rome.

For further information, click here.

We hope you are having a wonderful time Heather!

Small Sculpture Award

Congratulations to Michael Doolan, Titania Henderson and Heather B. Swann who are finalists in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award!

The exhibition opens on 2 November and runs until 10 December.

For more information click here.

Heather B. Swann | Text as Image

Heather B.Swann has been included in the group exhibition Text (as) Image
 at Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University, opening September 6 from 6-8pm.

The exhibition will also feature works by:
 Brook Andrew, Peter Burke, Angela Cavalieri, Sue Dodd, Christopher Hanrahan,
 Bridget Hillebrand, Danius Kesminas, Barbara Kruger, Richard Lewer, Mike Parr,
 Simon Pericich, Matt Shannon, and Imants Tillers.

Deakin University contemporary small sculpture award 2011

Michael Doolan, Titania Henderson and Heather B. Swann have been selected as finalists in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award 2011. A winner will be announced on November 2. Stay tuned for news!




Michael Doolan then is not now (purple) 2010, enquire about this work.

100 Artists. 100 Tickets. 100 Dollars.

We are very pleased to support You're Welcome - a charity art raffle where every ticket wins an original work and all proceeds go to the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre.

100 Artists. 100 Tickets. 100 Dollars.

Heather B. Swann, Lara Merrett, Lionel Bawden and Rhys Lee have donated works to the project. Get involved!

For one afternoon only at Mars Gallery (418 Bay St, port Melbourne) from 3-6pm on Sunday July 24 to add a special piece to your wall and contribute to a great cause.

Gallery Interview: Heather B. Swann

We took a moment to chat to Heather B. Swann about her newest exhibition Bone, currently showing at Karen Woodbury Gallery. Here is what she had to say:

Heather B. Swann

KWG: Now that your new exhibition, Bone has been installed in the gallery, can you tell me a little about how you got here?

HBS: When I started to think about a new body of work to show at Karen Woodbury I immediately considered the rectangular space. There is nowhere to hide so I decided that the work should read as a whole, as an installation rather than a group of works. As usual I started by spending some weeks drawing. I have been making sculpture for nearly twenty years now so each exhibition is a chance to start something new but inevitably I start where I left off last time and loop back on old ideas, take the chance to refine forms that I have worked on before - I can fill a whole sketchbook with tiny refinements of just one shape. A woman’s thigh can mutate into a horse’s head and then into the barrel of a gun… A dog’s head can align with a bicycle seat and then become a Picasso bull’s head pun. A man’s exaggerated long back becomes a bone and at the same time it becomes a cock. The drawing process is messy and wild and fun. I usually take over our dining room table as well as working in the studio. This time I kept coming back to the bone shape. At the same time I was reading Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. This is a very intense novel, it is not as violent as some of his other work but the feeling is raw – down to the bone.

Pablo Picasso bull's head 1943

A working drawing from Heather's sketchbook

KWG: So the drawing is instrumental. You always draw in black ink and your sculptures are nearly always black. Is there a link?

HBS: Yes. I started making art as a printmaker – this is not as straightforward a link as it could be but I do think that working with all that rich beautiful black ink captured my soul. I started out making etchings that were very figurative and full – I was enraptured by the works of Hieronymus Bosch just like many art students – by the freedom that the visions of the Temptations of St Anthony give any artist. When I discovered sculpture I merely translated the figures that I had been drawing and etching into three

dimensions. I used colour and decoration and was excited about it. And then I was awarded a residency to spend five months in Paris – this was my first travel out of Australia – and everything changed. I spent nearly every day of that five months in the Louvre and other museums and galleries – I discovered history through objects. I found myself going further and further back in history – I started to dream of falling into shapes – those shapes were simple and refined and worn with time. I wanted to throw everything away and start again, so I did. I dispensed with colour and decoration and narrative and concentrated on form and profile and curve. I dressed those forms in black – it could have been white, but not colour.

All through this I kept drawing in black ink on white paper and gradually the drawings too became simpler, less about telling a story and more about form. I am not trained in drawing and merely use it as a vehicle to get ideas onto paper. This suits the way I work as a sculptor – capturing a black edge against white – the profile of a black sculpture in a clean space.

Heather B. Swann Hyper-text 2010

KWG: Can you tell me how you translate the drawing into sculpture?

HBS: During the drawing I eventually manage to draw something that looks like a sculpture that I would like to make. Then I start – wood, modelling clay, glue, nails etc. I never have 12 drawings of sculptures and then 12 sculptures. One feeds off another, one leads to another. There will be many drawings that simply play around with ideas and forms that can never be realized – these drawings just pile up and I go through them over and over again or pin them up on the studio wall.

This time I started by making the bone that is like the long back of a man – it became a long back to bear the weight of a monkey. I was reading around the folklore and phraseology of the monkey on your back and discovered that a monkey with a long tail is slang for a mortgage – this rang true with my current financial struggle and also suited my penchant for an elegant serpentine curve. I always work like this – a drawing, a curve, a form comes together with a situation, an idea; this will fit a line from a song, a feeling, an art historical reference, a joke or a weight and then they will fit with a making technique, a material.

The long man’s back led to making the raw woman bone that became the sculpture Equestrienne. A feeling of raw desperation but also a quiet nod to Brancusi’s Princesse X and a good old fashioned belly laugh with Bourgeois’ Fillette. The double-backed beast brought those two backs together and sees them rutting on the floor in the corner. I have been drawing these two backs for years – they used to have legs but through the drawing process they had become simpler, more connected and now they had found a place.

Heather B. Swann Equestrienne 2011

The rat and the dog are simply two more troublemakers to join in the fun with the monkey. That dog will always be waiting for a bone. The rat is a boner, a huge shunga print phallus. The bicycle thieves can also read like two boners checking each other out, but equally they are two birds, two Venetian masks, an impossible journey. I really do not have any reasoning with this one, it was a drawing and became a sculpture.

The long back bone had become so luxurious and like a weird chaise lounge, I liked it but I was not prepared to let everything settle into such comfort so I drew out the bones of the spine into a spiky barbed whip. And then I made it. And hung it. And was a little frightened.

Heather B. Swann Barb (detail) 2010

KWG: It sounds as if things can get a little out of hand in your studio…

HBS: Yes, I like that!!

Heather working in the studio

Heather B. Swann | Bone | until April 30 2011 | info@kwgallery.com

Heather B. Swann

We are pleased to launch the highly anticipated exhibition of works by Heather B. Swann this evening from 6-8pm. The show will be officially opened by Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA The Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History, Australian National University.

David Hansen has written a brilliant overview about Heather's work which we have included below:

Breathing down your neck

In this exhibition, Heather B. Swann lays bare one of her central preoccupations" wilderness and containment, and the nexus or relationship between the beast and the body.

Animals appear often in the artist's work; creatures both wild and domesticated, cunning and dumb, with their physical features refined or intensified, abstracted or hybridised.

Here in Bone we encounter three particular favourites.

The dog has long been a significant brute presence in Swann's work, from her earliest undergraduate etchings to more recent Romanesque-surrealist sculptures such as Dog Eat Dog (2005, Dubbo Regional Gallery) and the 2007 City of Melbourne Laneways project, Gates of Hell. Then there is the rat, standing on its hind legs and sniffing the air, which has featured in many drawings as well as in the pack of Ratties of 2005 (private collection). Finally, there is the relatively recent addition to the artist's menagerie, the skyhook-tailed monkey which we see in Grinderman (2008, private collection) and Hook (2009 National Gallery of Australia).

But this trio are more than just comfortable familiars. These particular species have been adopted by the artists because of their dark sides, their bad reputations: the snarling, barking, growling, howling canine; the dirty rat of sexual and economic opportunism, of sewers and gangsterism; the lewd, loud incorrigible, mischievous ape. They are troublemakers.

In these works not only is there the possibility of anthropomorphic reading, the possibility that each figure might stand for a particular attitude or emotional or intellectual position. The long history of human interaction with these guys is such as to have produced a rich store of linguistic and pictorial metaphor: the low dog, the black dog, the mad dog, the lap dog; the rat race, rats leaving sinking ships, rats we can smell; the cheeky monkey business in the margins of medieval manuscripts, the monkey on your back of addiction or obsession, the monkey the the long tail of a mortgage. These are not rudderless, cute animalia.

There is also something deeper, something primal happening here. Swann emphasizes this mythic dimension through the three beasts' essential dependence on a human climbing frame of reference. This is fauna in your face, on your back, breathing down your neck, gnawing on your bones; the dog, the rat and the monkey require a structure for their fierce play of dominance and submission.

Swann provides just such zoo-enclosure furniture in the current installation's hard, osseous core, a suite of variously abstracted human backbones: a long torso racked over a wooden wedge to create a strange form somewhere between a vaulting horse, an avil, the pommel of a saddle and a Chinese footbinding shoe; a couple of Duchampian bisexual bicycle wheel vertebra-rings; a massive metacarpal woman knuckle; a corset laced, dark, upright tower; and that familiar, ferocious atavism of sexual coupling, a Rabelaisian-Shakespearean 'beast with two backs'.

Here in this dream space, in the beast mistress 'Platonic cave, homo sapiens' fragile, temporary, frontal-lobe dominance of the earth is revealed as a very nervous system indeed, little more than a pattern of shifting profiles, a vague, ambiguous spinal x-ray, a dance of evolutionary shadows.

David Hansen
Melbourne, January 2011

The exhibition runs until April 30. Please email the gallery on info@kwgallery.com for further information

image details: Ratty 2011 49.0 x 16.0 x 65.0 cm metal and resin

Basic Instinct | 2 - 26 March 2011

Basic Instinct signals the kick off of our 2011 exhibition schedule. We have loads instore for the year including solo exhibitions by Heather B. Swann, Monika Tichacek, Rhys Lee, Michael Cusack, McLean Edwards, Marie Hagerty, Michael Doolan, Del Kathryn Barton and Lionel Bawden, so stay tuned to all of our updates.

Basic Instinct is a group exhibition bringing together the work of eleven contemporary Australian artists for whom drawing is an essential element of their practice.

Alongside eight of our gallery artists we have invited Patrick Doherty, Lorraine Heller-Nicholas and Simon O'Carrigan to be a part of the show which aims to locate the intrinsic, subliminal and instinctive quality that drawing holds for the exhibiting artists.

Head to our website to find out more about this exhibition and the exhibiting artists, including pricing.

Please note: Six of Del Kathryn Barton's drawings will join the Basic Instinct exhibition after the Freehand exhibition closes on Sunday at Heide Museum of Modern Art. We will let you know as soon as they are on the wall.

Australia Council Grants

Lots of good news in the gallery this week...

Our congratulations to gallery artists Heather B. Swann and Jonathon Nichols on achieving Australia Council Skills and Arts Development Grants.

Heather will travel to Rome for a Studio Residency and Jonathon to Liverpool for a Studio Residency.

And also, congratulations to our gallery manager Rachael Watts on achieving a Skills and Arts Development General Research Grant to research key international trends in interdisciplinary art and publish written work on her findings.

McLean Edwards, Rhys Lee, Fiona Lowry Heather B. Swann

Featuring the work of four relatively new artists to the Karen Woodbury Gallery stable, our final exhibition for 2010 will be a showcase of works by McLean Edwards, Rhys Lee, Fiona Lowry and Heather B. Swann. Each of these artists display a poetic tension and curiosity within their work through their paintings, works on paper and sculpture.

Please join us for drinks with the artists to celebrate from 3 - 5pm tomorrow, Saturday November 20.

Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award

Heather B Swann and Lisa Roet have both been included in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award.

In its second year, this $10,000 annual acquisitive award and exhibition supports the professional development of arts managers in the Australia arts.

Whilst we know there can only only be one winner we've got our fingers crossed it will be a tie to Lisa Roet and Heather B Swann!

The exhibition opens this evening and runs until December 4.

Heather B. Swann: Sculpture Award

Karen and Rachael took a trip out to Heather B. Swann's St Kilda studio this week to catch up on what she's been up to...

We were pleased to hear that Heather's work has been included in the Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award (a $10,000 Acquisitive Award) and that she has been shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.

A winner will be announced at the exhibition opening on October 27.













Karen Woodbury and Heather B. Swann

Heather B. Swann - Sovereign Asian Art prize

Heather B. Swann has been nominated for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize.

Finalists will be announced in August 2010. The prestigious first prize of US$25,000 will be announced at beginning of the finalists' exhibition in October 2010.

New Gallery Artists

We are pleased to welcome artists Fiona Lowry and  Heather B Swann to Karen Woodbury Gallery.

Fiona and Heather (along with Rhys Lee) will be exhibiting together in a group exhibition at Karen Woodbury Gallery, opening on 17 November.

Fender Katsalidis Commission - Heather B Swann

Heather B Swann has recently completed a large sculpture commission for the foyer of the
New Acton South apartment building in  Canberra designed by Melbourne architects Fender Katsalidis.