Heather B. Swann, The Ourobouros

Heather B. Swann has established a formidable reputation as a maker of sculptural objects and ink drawings of dark, sensual and fantastic presence. With influences ranging widely across themes and imagery drawn from museum culture, history, mythology and natural science, Swann works outwards from the poetics of intimate sensation, emotion and thought. She is closely engaged with both the eternal present of perception and her own world of feeling, as well as making allusion to the particular crises of our troubled times. Her project is the translation of such fleeting phenomenological observations into form. Swann’s figurative reflexes often produce images of human or animal bodies, semblances of life kinked by surrealist convulsion and an instinct for abstraction.

Swann was named the recipient of the 2025 Copyright Agency Partnerships commission, presented in collaboration with UNSW Galleries, and has a forthcoming solo exhibition, The Forest of Symbols at UNSW Galleries in late 2026. Swann has also recently been awarded an Australian Print Workshop Shelton Artist Fellowship, which result in a suite of lithographs to be exhibited at the Print Workshop in Melbourne in March 2026. In addition to presenting more than twenty solo shows since 1993, Swann has had work included in numerous significant curated group exhibitions, including Inner Sanctum, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2024); From the other side, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2023-2024); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2023); The National 4: New Australian Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2023); Setouchi Triennale, Japan, (2022); Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2021); Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2016); and Streetwise: contemporary print culture, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2015). In 2025, Swann was awarded the Barbara Tribe Travelling Arts Scholarship by Art Gallery of New South Wales to participate in the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris residency program. Swann is represented in many private and public collections.