Heather B. Swann is a self-confessed ‘big feeler’: an artist driven by a primal, emotional response to the world.

Ranging widely across themes and imagery drawn from museum culture - history, mythology and natural science, Swann digs deeply into the more obscure domains of sensation and passion. In anthropology and psychology, that is, both in the study of human communities and of the individual psyche, clear distinctions and polarities are observable. Whether it be the public or private, the macro, socio-political world or the micro, intimate world – all exist alongside another space; a darker, more chaotic-inchoate world: the place of poetry and dreams. As inspiration for Feeler, Swann has looked introspectively at this very place and asked: ‘What do I do with all these things that there is no-one to tell?’

The drawings in this exhibition traverse all three spaces, yet manage to display a remarkable aesthetic coherence. Through deliberately-constructed and stylised; through unconscious, habitual renderings of particular parts of the human body, and even through error, reworking and redemption, the artist produces a coherent yet distinctive style. Though Swann is primarily a sculptor, she consciously observes that the practice of sculpture is very often, if not always, intimately linked to that of drawing. In drawing, all those problems of physics that so bedevil the making of objects – gravity, weight, the intractability of materials – simply disappear, dispersed by the quantum mechanics of the plane.

Swann employs her characteristic pictorial language - the expressively twisted or truncated bodies, the restricted, often suprematist-red-white-black palette, the compositional finesse - this carnivalesque parade of animate and inanimate matter, solids and voids, body parts and wholes does not recount a story, does not explore a theme, does not illustrate an idea. These works grew out of a period and a sense of ennui, exile and stasis and each composition describes or evokes a very particular mood, a state of mind or spirit.