This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with red and then
with orange: the world burns
- Margaret Atwood, You Begin
[...]Swinney’s work responds to the physical, virtual, and spiritual worlds around her. If art is to imitate life, then art, as Swinney’s paintings are, is a copy of a copy — leading us, again, towards illusion, rather than reality. Swinney engages with Plato’s philosophy of art, which describes the physical world as an imperfect and decaying copy of a perfect, eternal changeless original. This reverts back to the tensions made tangible by Swinney between unreal and hyper-real natural environments, such as aquariums, greenhouses, and botanical gardens. She depicts nature through illustrating the hyper-natural in a dream-like fog, defamiliarising it almost in an attempt to familiarise us with it: to make us feel what nature has been or could be.









Black Pool, 2019. Oil on silk, 252 x 400 cm










Conservatory, 2019. Oil on silk, 300 x 305 cm




Mirror Words, 2019. Oil on silk, 130 x 120 cm
Grasp, 2019. Oil on silk, 130 x 100 cm


Still II (Bridge), 2019 Oil on silk 55 x 50 cm
Artwork Photgraphy by Matthew Bradley // Installation Photography by Hayden Phipps // Courtesy of the Artist and WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery