Jess Swney

Jess Swney graduated Massey Univesity with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Arts. Her recent work navigates themes of self-discovery, unconscious biases and vulnerability.

Swney’s use of fabric can be viewed as part of a historical continuum and critique of our cultural heritage, which saw ‘textiles’ as medium and vocabulary typically assigned to women. Her tufted rug ‘paintings’ address the nuanced journey of self-awareness and societal expectations – through the unseen and the unspoken. They offer a space to explore complex dynamics faced by young females navigating social interactions within a patriarchal framework, hinting at how societal pressures and personal experiences influence their strategies for asserting themselves.

Swney’s subject matter floats between abstraction and realism, developed from both memory and experience, using materiality and tone to define and redefine these intents. In this respect her partiality discernible forms exploit the all-important edge between form, colour and texture to relay experience and expressions of emotion, without merely ‘depicting a scene’. These playful works explore the ability to simultaneously produce beauty and pleasure from the complex interplay of personal and collective struggles.