Ricky Swallow
1974-

Come Together, 2002
Jelutong
26 x 25 1/4 x 31 7/8"

Collection of Peter Norton

COMMENTS

Broadly speaking, Ricky Swallow’s wood carved sculptures could be described as vanitas. Aside from the symbolism and memento mori-ness are the personal narratives and history of the artist, immortalised in a sleeping bag or paper wrapper that mimics the drapes and folds in a typical Old Master still life, an eel hangs out in a tyre and a skull gets sucked into the bum-space of a leather bean bag (Come Together). Swallow learnt how to carve from a learn-how-to-carve book which is both brilliant and baffling to the non handy.

- Bryony Quinn, "Ricky Swallow," It's Nice That, Web, 7 April 2011


SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

BORN 1974, SAN REMO, AUSTRALIA
LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES

Ricky Swallow’s devotion to woodcarving aligns him with past masters of the craft. His sculptures are often carved in an exquisitely life-like manner that underscores the time and labor involved in his practice. In Come Together, he mixes massproduced, pop-cultural references such as a bean bag chair with a skull—a timeless object of contemplation. The skull references vanitas, a theme most readily associated with 17th-century still lifes wherein objects symbolize the fleeting nature of worldly possessions and life itself.

Sleeping Range also alludes to mortality. Traces of a body seem to linger in the ripples of the hard wood that Swallow so dexterously carves to resemble a soft, nylon sleeping bag. In Rehearsal for Retirement, the implied body of the sculpture is severed at the ankles, recalling ancient statues of which only fragments survive. In this simultaneous look backwards to the past and forward to “retirement,” the viewer becomes complicit in the artist’s preoccupation with the passage of time.

Labour and Wait, 2013