In the Studio by Leah Ollman (Art in America, May 2014)
This document is consists of a number of texts about Ricky Swallow and his art practice. I have read and highlighted some key points I would like you to read. It provides you with some important ideas from the artist himself.
___________________________________________________________________________ OLLMAN: What was the visual landscape like in the small coastal town of San Remo, in Victoria, where you grew up?
SWALLOW: Now that I live in a bigger city, where everyone is a stranger, I think of the town that I grew up in as almost a folkloric place...everybody knowing everybody. My father was a fisherman. His father was a fisherman. A lot of the colors I’ve been introducing into the bronzes in the last couple of years, a combination of white, black and red...relate to the heavy gloss enamel used on fishing boats and fishing equipment. My dad was always managing or maintaining his fishing boat, and those projects seem now like my first idea of sculpture... Pouring lead into molds to make anchor weights in the backyard or upkeeping the nets through weaving—I was around a lot of that craft. There’s an honesty or accountability in it that I like and is related to the kind of work I chose to pursue in the studio. OLLMAN: The language you use in talking about your work usually has to do with change in status or identity, transformation, even alchemy. SWALLOW: I’ve always been involved in a process of object translation. Before I started making the wood carvings, I was making replicas out of cardboard... They were of first-generation handheld computer games, old stereos—things I took for granted... I like that space of the industrial prototype or the monument, where something is being suggested or remembered—not being used, but looked at as a form. OLLMAN: In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson’s 1990 book about still-life painting, he discusses...the depiction of so-called unimportant things, and...the depiction of grand events—history with a capital H. [Unimportant things]...have the “potential for overturning the scale of human importance.” That rings true of your work with mundane subjects. SWALLOW: I don’t see any limitations in humble objects. A lot of the things that I’ve remade in sculpture are things of ritual to one person... Something you have a direct relationship to, that you use in a daily way. There’s something about selecting those things that have a one-to-one relationship with someone and then having a one-to-one relationship with the making of them. There is a meditative quality to overlooked things that allows them a different kind of energy or power. http://www.rickyswallow.com/texts/in-the-studio-by-leah-ollman/ |