The Thousands

Ricky Swallow’s sculptures address fundamental issues that lie at the core of who we are. Things have lives. We are our things. We are things. It is our things – our material possessions – that outlive us. Anyone who has lost a family member or close friend knows this: what we have once that person is gone are the possessions that formed a life, and memories.

Just as we are defined and represented by the things that we collect over time, we are ultimately objects ourselves. When we are dead and decomposed, what remains are our bones, another type of object. Archaeology, for instance, is entirely based on piecing together narratives of human relations from objects both whole and fragmentary-humble objects and skeletal remains. Swallow’s art addresses these basic yet enduring notions and reminds us of our deep symbiotic relationship to the stuff of daily life.

Like the bricoleur put into popular usage by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Ricky Swallow creates works of art inspired by objects from his immediate surroundings. His sculptures are not assemblages of found objects, but rather elegantly crafted things. Hand-carved from wood or plaster or cast in bronze, these humble objects are transformed into memorials to both the quotidian and the passage of time.