Jess Swney: I Think My Pig is Whistling
Jess Swney graduated from Massey University in 2023 with a First Class Honours Degree in Fine Arts. Her creative practice spans various mediums including oil painting, textiles, sculpture, and projections. Throughout her exploration, she delves into the intrinsic connection between the act of creation and the natural world. Her work investigates the consequences of human interaction with the environment, adopting an eco-didactic approach aimed at prompting reflection and encouraging behavioural change
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. Swney’s choice of tufting as a medium is particularly resonant. Originating in North America in the late 19th century, tufting emerged as an accessible and cost-effective technique for creating warm bed coverings, often devised by women using surplus fabric and repurposed materials in response to economic hardship. It was a handcraft rooted in necessity and care, practiced within domestic, largely female, settings. Over time, tufting evolved into a vibrant contemporary artform, adopted by a new generation of artists interested in materiality, labour, and texture. In Swney hands, tufting becomes both aesthetic and conceptual—a deliberate nod to the often-dismissed decorative arts and a quiet refusal of hierarchies that privilege painting and sculpture over textile and touch.
Swney’s interest in the applied arts as a site of both care and critique finds a potent outlet here. Her broader practice often plays with dualities—land and sea, presence and absence, intimacy and entitlement—drawing on personal experience to navigate how women move through and are received in the world. That positionality finds a quiet but insistent echo in this collaboration, embedded in careful decisions around colour, texture, and form. There is a feminism at work that insists through materiality and attention—that softness is not secondary. That the decorative is deliberate. That what has historically been dismissed as feminine or functional is, in fact, complex and vital