Heather B Swann
Heather B Swann lives and works in Tasmania. She has worked in collaboration with Nonda Katsalidis on a sculptural piece that has been permanently installed on the art island of Teshima, Japan.
Man Barrow Forkers
Heather B Swann’s elegant and ephemeral Man Barrow Forkers seem to graze in the landscape like they are part of the mob of kangaroo. In her own words she describes these skeleton, linear ghost like sculptures;
“… As well as the shape of the sky the long barrow shape makes a reference to agriculture – the man arched over the earth, forker hands digging in the soil – but also to a related theme in its tracing of the shape of prehistoric burial mounds.
Sometimes enormous heaps of earth and stones, but as often smaller and containing only one body, these mounds or barrows refer to a belief in the cyclical nature of life and death and fertilization. They are primal, like the omphalos, the navel of the world, the sacred stone in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi.
The sculptures resemble old and rusty tools found abandoned in a field or paddock, the use for which has long been forgotten. The simple shape recalls pre-mechanical farming practices – the plough pushed by man or pulled by horse – but also older agricultural acts; notably the belief that the ritualised sexual act was essential for the fruitfulness of the crop.
The Man Barrow Forkers are essentially curves in space: agricultural-sexual abstracts that are brand new shapes in the world, but at the same time so archetypal in reference as to be absolutely familiar. Night Creatures. I had begun. No stopping…”
Gates of Hell
The work was originally commissioned for the City of Melbourne’s Laneways public art program in 2007, and built into a wall at the Degraves Place entrance of the Flinders Street Station pedestrian underpass. After six months in situ, it was smashed up by grand final night revellers, but was subsequently reconstructed as an interior work, on commission from Karl Fender. In this, its third manifestation, Gates of Hell has been re-imagined and enlarged in collaboration with Nonda Katsalidis.
“No one believes in heaven and hell anymore. Here on earth we have it all…”
In Greek and Roman mythology, the multi-headed dog monster Cerberus protects the entrance of Hades, the underworld. Gates of Hell has its origin not only in this classical imagery, in the stories of Hercules and Orpheus, but also in the forms of French Romanesque sculpture, with its heraldic, symbolic and decorative beasts and its Last Judgement hell mouths.
More important than these cultural references, however, is the work’s primitive emotion, its expression of angry threat. Cerberus’s barking, biting heads are designed to frighten us out of our complacency and lethargy.
This sculpture represents the gates of hell.
The idea of the gate or door is suggested by the work’s quadrilateral frame. The lowness of the lintel increases the gravity of the space, drawing attention to ground level, hinting at a connection to a subterranean world.
The work is a portrait of Cerberus, in Greek myth the monstrous hound who guards the entrance to Hades. Before convention and problems of visual representation limited him to three, Cerberus was held to have many heads. Framed by a recession in the wall, the sculpture comprises multiple dogs’ heads, a rearing, snarling pack rising from below the ground.
It is designed to surprise, thrill and chill, particularly on first encounter. It represents fear, both the artist’s and the viewers’, fear both in the particular and in the abstract.
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