Ricky Swallow: Keeping it (sur)real in Venice

If you find yourself standing in front of a Ricky Swallow sculpture and feel tempted to prod the surface of let’s say a soft leather-looking beanbag, and consequently incur the wrath of the gallery guard, you certainly wouldn’t be unique.

I experienced this urge at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 when Ricky Swallow presented his solo exhibition This time another year in the Australian Pavilion. I lost count of the number of times I heard “non si tocca” uttered by the invigilator, reminding the young and not-so-young visitors that they must not touch the artworks.

Most of Swallow’s finely carved sculptures in the exhibition are of familiar, everyday objects. Despite their ordinariness, or perhaps because of it, they are both beautiful and unsettling. He draws the viewer close to the washed-out pale wood surfaces with a hyper realistic aesthetic that is often associated with the Surrealists. These are very different from the ethereal, dreamlike vistas in paint on canvas of a Salvador Dali. Swallow’s objects are grounded, solid: they have an imposing presence, and are very much real. 

On the replica kitchen table of Killing Time (2003-2004) is an abundant catch of the day featuring fish of many varieties, lobsters, crabs, and a couple of oysters fashioned out of laminated Jelutong and maple wood. The notes about this work in the brilliant catalogue essay by the exhibition curator, Charlotte Day, inform us that Swallow’s father was a keen fisherman, and this bountiful harvest in wood is a homage. Looking beyond the biographical references of the kitchen table in the Victorian coastal town where Swallow spent his childhood, there is also a sense of repentance by the artist, as though he is apologising to all the sea creatures who met an untimely end. It is also a jaw-dropping virtuosic display of artistry by a master craftsman.

Swallow is making a point that the often-reproduced, ubiquitous, sometimes parodied visual imagery of famous artworks and art movements persist centuries later and form part of our collective memory. Paintings from the 17th Century Dutch artists who excelled in the popular genre of still life, or ‘vanitas’, fill the walls of art galleries. In Killing Time Swallow is riffing the style, right down to the half-peeled orange, reminding us of the impermanence of life and the folly of coveting lavish status symbols. Each meticulously replicated object is intricately detailed and prompts us to ponder the countless hours that were spent in this excruciatingly laborious process. It also calls to mind the monk-like dedication and discipline that Swallow must have had to be able to produce such an ambitious piece.

Through the ‘natura morta’ tableau of Salad Days (2005) Swallow captures a scene that represents a good day’s hunting. Hanging proudly on display are a duck, pigeon, and rabbit. Devoid of colour with feathers and fur now a monochrome sepia tone, these everyday animals don’t appear so familiar.

In Come Together (2002) a beanbag becomes an inverse plinth or a perverse couch-potato body for a human skull that nestles deep within its folds. The sculpture is a playful ‘memento mori’, referencing both the symbolic function that skulls have played throughout art history as reminders to viewers to ‘seize the day’ and also their resurgence in contemporary popular culture. 

In Field Recordings / Highland Park Hydra (2003) a cactus immortalises those whose names are engraved into it. The letters are stretched and distorted by the growth of the plant, measuring the passage of time that the succulent has endured and adapted, before being eventually fashioned in wood.

Art movements fall in and out of fashion throughout the ages and iconic works creep into aspects of popular culture and become part of contemporary visual vocabulary. Swallow references so many of these in true post-modern style and makes them accessible. The viewer need not be an art cognoscente to take delight in the artworks, or their playful, humourous, and often ironic titles.

Swallow is not so much giving birth to new meaning from the juxtaposition of elements, as playing the role of midwife: easing ideas out of us, facilitating the joyous discovery of the infinite number of connections between personal experience and collective memory.

Fish, game, skulls, a beanbag, a cactus. These are all common, ordinary objects. Transformed by Swallow, they appear strange and unfamiliar. The invitation to look beneath the surface is tantalising, as is the desire to poke the beanbag just to confirm for ourselves that it really is made of wood, as it states on the label.

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MT Rizzo, ‘Ricky Swallow - Keeping it (sur)real in Venice’, Museums Australia Magazine, Canberra, Vol 14, No 3, February 2006 (available as a print publication only)