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An awareness of time and its passing is a powerful force in Ricky Swallow's art. It is the subject that has preoccupied his practice since the late 1990s and surfaces repeatedly throughout his works. Salad days, 2005, recently acquired with funds provided by the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, provides an intense and autobiographical focus on the nature of time, life and death. Developed by Swallow for the 2005 Venice Biennale where it was exhibited alongside its companion , 2003-04 (in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales), Salad days, like Killing time, marks a shift in direction away from the pop iconography of his earlier works towards a more introspective approach. Salad days is rooted in personal memory and the artist's sense and experience of time.

Meticulously hand-carved from jelutong, a pale-coloured hardwood that in recent years has become Swallow's preferred material, Salad days is a relief sculpture in the classical tondo format. A rabbit, duck, magpie and sparrow form the central ensemble, tethered together, hanging upside down. Beneath them rats, mice, lizards and a small fox's skull add to the inventory of deceased creatures. Rendered with remarkable exactitude and attention to detail, the bodies of these animals appear oddly alert, as if in suspended animation or between life and death, strangely fixed forever in their final moment. Looking in from an outer edge, a swallow has stopped to survey the sombre scene. Witness to time's passing, the bird (and artist's namesake) encapsulates the work's reflection on mortality, and self-consciously dwells on the artist's past.

By merging art historical sources with imagery charged with nostalgia for a youth spent in coastal and country Australia, Swallow brings an autobiographical perspective to the art-historical conventions of the still life and vanitas. European game lifted from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still-life paintings are transformed into animals commonly found in the Australian landscape. A hare borrowed from a Chardin painting reappears as a rabbit; a partridge from a still life by Jan Baptiste Weenix is reconfigured as a magpie. Conceived as a sculptural inventory of all the things Swallow can remember hunting during his youth, Salad days functions like a melancholic catalogue of memories, summoning events from the past.

For Swallow, the lengthy time required to produce a sculpture is as important as the material outcome. The carving process is a way of 'honouring' his subjects. Each finely registered detail represents a measure of time; every sculpture, an accumulation of moments passed. In Salad days (and the Killing time project it concludes), the process has become an act of atonement; each carved form - and each life lost - is, as Swallow has stated, 'a debt paid in time'.

Salad days is a poignant sculpture that formally acknowledges the artist's own history while simultaneously musing on the human condition. It marks an important development in Swallow's work and is a valuable addition to the gallery's collection of contemporary art.

Jane Devery, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art and Exhibitions, National Gallery of Victoria (in 2006).

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An awareness of time and its passing is a powerful force in Ricky Swallow's art. It is the subject that has preoccupied his practice since the late 1990s and surfaces repeatedly throughout his works. Salad days, 2005, recently acquired with funds provided by the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, provides an intense and autobiographical focus on the nature of time, life and death.

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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. When all is said and done it is our things-our material possessions-that outlive us.

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Exhibition. Jan 19–Mar 20, 2006. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents an exhibition of the sculptor Ricky Swallow, the representative of the Australian pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennial. Several works from the Biennial exhibition will be on view at P.S.1, including his seminal piece Killing Time. This is the first survey of Swallow’s work in a U.S. museum. Ricky Swallow will be on view from January 19, 2006 through March 20, 2006. Renowned for their footing in personal memory and pop iconography, Swallow’s wood sculptures and carvings bridge the gap between monumentality and the everyday, tradition and disposability. His work focuses on themes at the heart of this exercise: the passage of time, immortality and mortality, evolution and survival. For many of Swallow’s works, there exists a generous dose of surrealist wit. This is evident in a 2004 piece entitled The Arrangement, where snakes slither in and out of a mundane bike helmet. The sculpture is brought alive by the dramatic curvature of the snakes’ movements, projecting out of different directions and taking the helmet either as hostage or an unlikely habitat. Growing Pains (Contingency for Beginners), a work from 2002, features a disembodied pair of hands (Swallow’s), mysteriously extending from the wall. The right hand cups the left, while the left palm holds a cluster of what appear to be pills or beans. The Exact Dimensions of Staying Behind is a sculpture from 2004-2005 that strongly employs the notion of vanitas, a poignant reminder of our mortality and the evanescence of things. It features a lone skeleton, fused to a chair while clutching a staff in one hand and a carving knife in the other. The skull dramatically gazes above, and according to the artist, the figure is much like him, “living in its pastime, locked into a particular activity, awaiting some release.” Killing Time (2004), perhaps Swallow’s most celebrated work and a highlight at the 2005 Venice Biennial, is a sumptuous, life-size sculptural interpretation of his family dining table, overflowing with the marine life he caught and killed as a child. It is informed by his father’s occupation as a fisherman in Melbourne, and of vanitas and the Dutch still-life tradition of the 17th century. Harking back to Dutch depictions of lavish banquet tables teeming with wild game and food so ripe to the point of being spoiled, Killing Time emphasizes life at a similar juncture: the bulging of fish eyes and the anatomical intricacies of crustaceans are so meticulously carved and detailed that the animals appear to exist at the cusp of death. These four works, along with a newly created piece entitled Harpoon Dodger, will be on view at P.S.1. Ricky Swallow is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Chief Curator and Curator, Department of Film and Media at The Museum of Modern Art. Ricky Swallow received a B.F.A. in 1996 from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia, where he currently resides. Since then he has exhibited widely in galleries and museums throughout Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Europe and Japan. His work has also been collected by such institutions as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Swallow was born in 1974 in San Remo, Australia.

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Thank goodness for the corpse on screen, the corpse in art. Deaths, ennobling. Deaths comical. Deaths natural, grotesque, banal. Small paintings, big subjects. The fragile comedy of life. The body, concealed, revealed. The story, the date and place of death, the drama. The wonder and the awfulness. The ambiguity. Lives wrenched from moorings. The spent and the stilled.
A corpse is a corpse, of course of course.
Apologies to Gertrude Stein. And to that television show pony, Mister Ed, for this terrible play on words. I don't know how else to begin. In composing this piece for Dying To Know Day 2014 my first thought was simply to reply to a recently circulated list of Corpses in Great Art with a list of ten such works from Australian artists. Over time, that purpose cooled, to be replaced by something other, a slant gesture of personal reflection, curated images, quotations from others' plays and someone else's poetry.

"And I lay down on the bench with my grey coat so as not to catch cold and I said to myself let us try

Let us try to be dead

Let us try as I lay down on the bench and I said to myself it is so I am dead"

- Opening lines of the play, Kids' Stuff by Raymond Cousse

William Strutt, The burial of Burke, 1911
Painting: oil on canvas; 122.0 x 204.0cm
Source: The State Library of Victoria

Playing Dead

As a thirteen year old girl I made my first appearance on stage as a professional actor, cast as much, I suspect, for my unfashionable 'pageboy' haircut as for any natural acting ability. I shared the role with another teenaged girl, taking it in turns on alternate nights to portray Macduff's son, an innocent child who has all of one line to say - 'Thou liest, thou shag-hair'd villain!' - before he is stabbed by the villainous First Murderer. Macduff's son then dies on stage, a second line - 'He has kill'd me, mother! Run away, I pray you! - his final utterance. I had never seen dying or death; nor did I do any research into what it should look like. No method acting for me. Instead, I grimaced, crumpled, folded, fell - carefully, but affectingly, I hoped - arranging myself at rest into something I imagined resembled a small boy's corpse. I held my breath and waited until I could sneak off stage. I repeated this for several nights a week for the duration of our run of Shakespeare's Scottish play. I did not see a real corpse until I was in my fifties.

Noel McKenna, Fall from Change Table 1993
Painting; oil on plywood; 36 x 41.5cm
The Watermill Collection
© Noel McKenna

In theatrical parlance corpsing is a slang term used to describe when an actor breaks character during a scene - usually by laughing or forgetting his or her lines, or by causing another cast member to do so.

It is believed that that the term "corpsing" may have originated when there was a corpse on stage, acted by a living actor: especially where there was any attempt by other actors to try to make that actor laugh.

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time 2003 - 2004
Laminated jelutong, maple 108 x 184 x 118 cm (irregular)
Purchased with funds provided by the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund and the Contemporary Collection Benefactors' Program 2004.
Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection.
©Ricky Swallow Photography: Karl Schwerdtfeger

"Body," "carcass," "corpse," and "cadaver" are terms used to refer to a physical organism, usually human or animal, when it is lifeless.
"Body" refers to the material organism of an individual, human or animal, both living or dead.
"Carcass" refers only to the dead body of an animal. It's also a term used in furniture-making.
"Corpse" refers only to the dead body of a human being (e.g., preparing a corpse for burial).
"Cadaver" refers to a dead body, usually a corpse, when used for scientific study (e.g., dissection of a specimen in an anatomy class).

Pia Interlandi
From Body Mould Series, 2009
© Pia Interlandi
Used with the artist's permission

Recently while eating soup for lunch, a chunk of potato lodged in my throat, and for a long moment, it seemed it would not budge. The spud was caught, wedged in my windpipe, and I could not breathe. I was alone in the house, my partner was at work, even our dogs were away, unable to come to my aid. "Run, Lassie! Fetch help." I leapt to my feet. I wondered how I could give myself the Heimlich manoeuvre. I wondered if I would have enough breath left to get myself outside, into the street, and if I had time to whip up a cardboard sign to take with me. "Help me! I'm choking." I wondered if drivers would read my sign and stop for me, or if I would collapse on the pavement, with no visible injury, before anyone came to my aid. The ignominy of it. I would be a suspicious death. They would draw around me, on the footpath, in white chalk. I would be subject to an autopsy, but perhaps the killer potato would have dissolved away, leaving no evidence.

I jumped twice, heavily on the wooden floorboards. I dislodged the murderous potato. I swallowed it. I breathed again, to live another day.

How will I die? Having been born with the umbilical cord around my neck I have a primal fear of choking.

I resolve, henceforth to cut my vegetables into smaller chunks. And to chew more thoroughly.

Tara Stubley, Death of The Artist, 2012
Painting: oil on linen; 100cm x 150cm
© Tara Stubley
Used with permission of the artist. Now in private collection

A few years ago I saw my first "live" corpse. Of course I'd seen my share of dead pets by then. I'd also been to many funerals. But there was something about seeing a dead body that felt like a belated rite of passage and having been with the deceased as she took her last breath made the experience all the more...I want to say... 'exhilarating'. I sat with the body a long time after the dying was done.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion - by Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion. Dead man naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.

Julia deVille, Victorian Cat Mummy, 2013
15 x 77 x 60 (wide inc cape) cm
Cat, glass, linen, Victorian lace, Victorian cape, Victorian baby boots, sterling silver
Exhibited at Sophie Gannon Gallery, 2012, in show entitled Sarcophagus
© JuliadeVille
Image courtesy of the artist and used with her permission

"The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is the mark of existence. "

- Simone Weil

******

Peta Murray is co-founder and Creative Director of The GroundSwell Project. Amongst her D2K Day activities this year is singing tenor in a massed choir as they tackle Mozart's monumental Requiem.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
William Shakespeare, English dramatist, was born in 1564 and died in 1616. He wrote poetry and numerous plays, many of which are crowded with corpses who meet their ends by suicide, murder, assassination, execution, and in battle. His bloodiest play is Titus Andronicus, where fourteen characters meet violent deaths over the course of five acts.

William Strutt (1825 - 1915) was an Australian artist. He worked on this painting for several years, having closely followed the Victorian Exploring Exhibition that cost Robert O'Hara Burke his life. Strutt was in fact one of the last to see Burke and his companions on the morning they set off on their expedition. Strutt based this painting on his own drawings and studies.

Noel McKenna, born 1956, is an Australian artist working across a range of practices including painting, print-making, drawing and ceramics. His work is infused with mystery and melancholy, and often presents ambiguous narratives imbued with states of anxiety. In 2014 he was a finalist for both the Sulman and Wynne prizes.

Ricky Swallow, born 1974, is an Australian sculptor now based in Los Angeles. Many of his works offer a new take on the ideas of memento mori and "the still life". You can read his extended biography at https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artist/swallow-ricky/

Pia Interlandi is a Melbourne-based fashion designer who makes burial garments that allow the body to be returned to, and embraced by the earth. The Body Moulds series was undertaken as part of doctoral research, and began with a proposal to create "bodies" merged with the landscape within a fashion context. Pia writes: "Moving out of traditional notions of fashion design and into more sculptural work, the series explored processes of growth and formation in the earth. For over two months each piece grew in a mould with soil and seeds, and then was flipped over to reveal the root patterning which had been growing under the surface. In essence, to see the hidden landscape, the plant life had to be cut off from the sun, and die a death."

Tara Stubley is an emerging artist, based in Melbourne, where she is undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA. Her painting, Death of The Artist, was produced in 2012, whilst she was studying at the CAE. The model for the painting was Tara's friend, and teacher, Peta Cross, who lay on the studio floor while Tara got the original image onto canvas. The finished work, a homage to Manet's The Dead Toreador, is highly symbolic and speaks of the slow death of a relationship and a transformation of the self. Tara writes: "For a few years I had felt like I was slowly dying on the inside and by reconnecting with my artistic passion I gained the courage to leave that life." See more of Tara's work at www.tarastubley.com

Dylan Thomas was born in 1914, so we are currently marking the centenary of his birth. Unfortunately, the poet died young, having been marked early as "roistering, drunken and doomed." Dylan Thomas wrote several celebrated works, and death was often a theme, as for instance in his famous poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Thomas wrote And Death Shall Have No Dominion in 1933 when he took up a challenge from a fellow poet to write about immortality. Its title comes from St Paul's Epistle to the Romans, but Thomas's take on the subject is not a conventional Christian view.

Julia deVille is a Melbourne-based artist, working with jewellery and taxidermy who has exhibited widely. Her work features the cadavers of creatures that have died of natural causes and is featured in major collections. Julia has a new show, Phantasmagoria, previewing at the Melbourne Art Fair (13 - 17th August) before an exhibition at the Sophie Gannon Gallery in September 2014. You can see her blog here: http://egetal.com.au/artists/bio/julia-deville

You can also hear Julia speak about her recent work in this video from the Adelaide Biennial

Raymond Cousse was a French writer born in 1942. He committed suicide in 1991. Kids' Stuff is his most widely known and performed work, examining life and death through a child's eyes.

For further corpses in Australian Art see also

Dead Dad by Ron Mueck

The Dead Landlord by William Dobell

Drought Photographs by Sidney Nolan

War Images by Joy Hester

See also, the exhibition Mortem In Imagine, by Natalie Ryan, 14 July - 5 September 2014 at LUMA (La Trobe University Museum of Art). La Trobe University, Kingsbury Drive, Bundoora, 3086.

Thank goodness for the corpse on screen, the corpse in art. Deaths, ennobling. Deaths comical. Deaths natural, grotesque, banal. Small paintings, big subjects. The fragile comedy of life. The body, concealed, revealed. The story, the date and place of death, the drama. The wonder and the awfulness. The ambiguity. Lives wrenched from moorings. The spent and the stilled.
A corpse is a corpse, of course of course.
Apologies to Gertrude Stein. And to that television show pony, Mister Ed, for this terrible play on words. I don't know how else to begin. In composing this piece for Dying To Know Day 2014 my first thought was simply to reply to a recently circulated list of Corpses in Great Art with a list of ten such works from Australian artists. Over time, that purpose cooled, to be replaced by something other, a slant gesture of personal reflection, curated images, quotations from others' plays and someone else's poetry.

"And I lay down on the bench with my grey coat so as not to catch cold and I said to myself let us try

Let us try to be dead

Let us try as I lay down on the bench and I said to myself it is so I am dead"

- Opening lines of the play, Kids' Stuff by Raymond Cousse

William Strutt, The burial of Burke, 1911
Painting: oil on canvas; 122.0 x 204.0cm
Source: The State Library of Victoria

Playing Dead

As a thirteen year old girl I made my first appearance on stage as a professional actor, cast as much, I suspect, for my unfashionable 'pageboy' haircut as for any natural acting ability. I shared the role with another teenaged girl, taking it in turns on alternate nights to portray Macduff's son, an innocent child who has all of one line to say - 'Thou liest, thou shag-hair'd villain!' - before he is stabbed by the villainous First Murderer. Macduff's son then dies on stage, a second line - 'He has kill'd me, mother! Run away, I pray you! - his final utterance. I had never seen dying or death; nor did I do any research into what it should look like. No method acting for me. Instead, I grimaced, crumpled, folded, fell - carefully, but affectingly, I hoped - arranging myself at rest into something I imagined resembled a small boy's corpse. I held my breath and waited until I could sneak off stage. I repeated this for several nights a week for the duration of our run of Shakespeare's Scottish play. I did not see a real corpse until I was in my fifties.

Noel McKenna, Fall from Change Table 1993
Painting; oil on plywood; 36 x 41.5cm
The Watermill Collection
© Noel McKenna

In theatrical parlance corpsing is a slang term used to describe when an actor breaks character during a scene - usually by laughing or forgetting his or her lines, or by causing another cast member to do so.

It is believed that that the term "corpsing" may have originated when there was a corpse on stage, acted by a living actor: especially where there was any attempt by other actors to try to make that actor laugh.

Ricky Swallow, Killing Time 2003 - 2004
Laminated jelutong, maple 108 x 184 x 118 cm (irregular)
Purchased with funds provided by the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund and the Contemporary Collection Benefactors' Program 2004.
Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection.
©Ricky Swallow Photography: Karl Schwerdtfeger

"Body," "carcass," "corpse," and "cadaver" are terms used to refer to a physical organism, usually human or animal, when it is lifeless.
"Body" refers to the material organism of an individual, human or animal, both living or dead.
"Carcass" refers only to the dead body of an animal. It's also a term used in furniture-making.
"Corpse" refers only to the dead body of a human being (e.g., preparing a corpse for burial).
"Cadaver" refers to a dead body, usually a corpse, when used for scientific study (e.g., dissection of a specimen in an anatomy class).

Pia Interlandi
From Body Mould Series, 2009
© Pia Interlandi
Used with the artist's permission

Recently while eating soup for lunch, a chunk of potato lodged in my throat, and for a long moment, it seemed it would not budge. The spud was caught, wedged in my windpipe, and I could not breathe. I was alone in the house, my partner was at work, even our dogs were away, unable to come to my aid. "Run, Lassie! Fetch help." I leapt to my feet. I wondered how I could give myself the Heimlich manoeuvre. I wondered if I would have enough breath left to get myself outside, into the street, and if I had time to whip up a cardboard sign to take with me. "Help me! I'm choking." I wondered if drivers would read my sign and stop for me, or if I would collapse on the pavement, with no visible injury, before anyone came to my aid. The ignominy of it. I would be a suspicious death. They would draw around me, on the footpath, in white chalk. I would be subject to an autopsy, but perhaps the killer potato would have dissolved away, leaving no evidence.

I jumped twice, heavily on the wooden floorboards. I dislodged the murderous potato. I swallowed it. I breathed again, to live another day.

How will I die? Having been born with the umbilical cord around my neck I have a primal fear of choking.

I resolve, henceforth to cut my vegetables into smaller chunks. And to chew more thoroughly.

Tara Stubley, Death of The Artist, 2012
Painting: oil on linen; 100cm x 150cm
© Tara Stubley
Used with permission of the artist. Now in private collection

A few years ago I saw my first "live" corpse. Of course I'd seen my share of dead pets by then. I'd also been to many funerals. But there was something about seeing a dead body that felt like a belated rite of passage and having been with the deceased as she took her last breath made the experience all the more...I want to say... 'exhilarating'. I sat with the body a long time after the dying was done.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion - by Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion. Dead man naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.

Julia deVille, Victorian Cat Mummy, 2013
15 x 77 x 60 (wide inc cape) cm
Cat, glass, linen, Victorian lace, Victorian cape, Victorian baby boots, sterling silver
Exhibited at Sophie Gannon Gallery, 2012, in show entitled Sarcophagus
© JuliadeVille
Image courtesy of the artist and used with her permission

"The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is the mark of existence. "

- Simone Weil

******

Peta Murray is co-founder and Creative Director of The GroundSwell Project. Amongst her D2K Day activities this year is singing tenor in a massed choir as they tackle Mozart's monumental Requiem.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
William Shakespeare, English dramatist, was born in 1564 and died in 1616. He wrote poetry and numerous plays, many of which are crowded with corpses who meet their ends by suicide, murder, assassination, execution, and in battle. His bloodiest play is Titus Andronicus, where fourteen characters meet violent deaths over the course of five acts.

William Strutt (1825 - 1915) was an Australian artist. He worked on this painting for several years, having closely followed the Victorian Exploring Exhibition that cost Robert O'Hara Burke his life. Strutt was in fact one of the last to see Burke and his companions on the morning they set off on their expedition. Strutt based this painting on his own drawings and studies.

Noel McKenna, born 1956, is an Australian artist working across a range of practices including painting, print-making, drawing and ceramics. His work is infused with mystery and melancholy, and often presents ambiguous narratives imbued with states of anxiety. In 2014 he was a finalist for both the Sulman and Wynne prizes.

Ricky Swallow, born 1974, is an Australian sculptor now based in Los Angeles. Many of his works offer a new take on the ideas of memento mori and "the still life". You can read his extended biography at https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artist/swallow-ricky/

Pia Interlandi is a Melbourne-based fashion designer who makes burial garments that allow the body to be returned to, and embraced by the earth. The Body Moulds series was undertaken as part of doctoral research, and began with a proposal to create "bodies" merged with the landscape within a fashion context. Pia writes: "Moving out of traditional notions of fashion design and into more sculptural work, the series explored processes of growth and formation in the earth. For over two months each piece grew in a mould with soil and seeds, and then was flipped over to reveal the root patterning which had been growing under the surface. In essence, to see the hidden landscape, the plant life had to be cut off from the sun, and die a death."

Tara Stubley is an emerging artist, based in Melbourne, where she is undertaking a Bachelor of Fine Art at the VCA. Her painting, Death of The Artist, was produced in 2012, whilst she was studying at the CAE. The model for the painting was Tara's friend, and teacher, Peta Cross, who lay on the studio floor while Tara got the original image onto canvas. The finished work, a homage to Manet's The Dead Toreador, is highly symbolic and speaks of the slow death of a relationship and a transformation of the self. Tara writes: "For a few years I had felt like I was slowly dying on the inside and by reconnecting with my artistic passion I gained the courage to leave that life." See more of Tara's work at www.tarastubley.com

Dylan Thomas was born in 1914, so we are currently marking the centenary of his birth. Unfortunately, the poet died young, having been marked early as "roistering, drunken and doomed." Dylan Thomas wrote several celebrated works, and death was often a theme, as for instance in his famous poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. Thomas wrote And Death Shall Have No Dominion in 1933 when he took up a challenge from a fellow poet to write about immortality. Its title comes from St Paul's Epistle to the Romans, but Thomas's take on the subject is not a conventional Christian view.

Julia deVille is a Melbourne-based artist, working with jewellery and taxidermy who has exhibited widely. Her work features the cadavers of creatures that have died of natural causes and is featured in major collections. Julia has a new show, Phantasmagoria, previewing at the Melbourne Art Fair (13 - 17th August) before an exhibition at the Sophie Gannon Gallery in September 2014. You can see her blog here: http://egetal.com.au/artists/bio/julia-deville

You can also hear Julia speak about her recent work in this video from the Adelaide Biennial

Raymond Cousse was a French writer born in 1942. He committed suicide in 1991. Kids' Stuff is his most widely known and performed work, examining life and death through a child's eyes.

For further corpses in Australian Art see also

Dead Dad by Ron Mueck

The Dead Landlord by William Dobell

Drought Photographs by Sidney Nolan

War Images by Joy Hester

See also, the exhibition Mortem In Imagine, by Natalie Ryan, 14 July - 5 September 2014 at LUMA (La Trobe University Museum of Art). La Trobe University, Kingsbury Drive, Bundoora, 3086.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thank goodness for the corpse on screen, the corpse in art. Deaths, ennobling. Deaths comical. Deaths natural, grotesque, banal. Small paintings, big subjects. The fragile comedy of life. The body, concealed, revealed. The story, the date and place of death, the drama. The wonder and the aw

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Ricky Swallow. Ricky Swallow first became known for his meticulously carved realistic wooden sculp...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Title

Artist

Date

2003-2004

Media category

Sculpture

Materials used

laminated Jelutong, maple

Dimensions

108.0 x 184.0 x 118.0 cm (irreg.)

Credit

Rudy Komon Memorial Fund and the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2004

Location

Not on display

Accession number

125.2004

Copyright

© Ricky Swallow. Courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Reproduction requests

Artist information

Ricky Swallow
Works in the collection

4

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In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact. More recently he has made carvings of the animate and inanimate conceived and realised at a ratio of 1:1. 'Killing time' is the most ambitious work that Swallow has made to date and is likely to remain so for some time due to the onerous and time-consuming physical task of working in such detail on this scale. It was the centrepiece of Swallow's solo exhibition at the Australian Pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

While 'Killing time' visually recalls 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and even the work of such a virtuoso illusionist woodcarver as Grinling Gibbons, the subject matter is derived from Swallow's personal experience. The son of a fisherman, he has faithfully depicted every sea creature that he recalls capturing, killing and eating during his life. The various fish, lobsters, oysters, crabs and others are displayed on a table which duplicates the table around which Swallow's family ate dinner. While 'Killing time' uses the visual language of a particular genre of painting and wood-carving, it is also an intensely personal act of remembering; it is another 'evaporated self-portrait' as Swallow has described his sculptures, which call on specific personal memories while also having a commonly recognisable subject matter.

'Killing time' is carved mainly from laminated jelutong, a pale coloured hardwood used commercially for prototypes and pattern-making but also by woodworking hobbyists for whittling. The illusionism of the sculpture is emphasised by the attention to detail in the lobster, the lemon peel that hangs over the edge of the table and the rippling folds of the tablecloth pushed to one end. However the monochromatic timber and the dramatic side-lighting, devised by Swallow to create strong shadows and highlights, point to the inherent unreality of transcribing animate form into inanimate materials. There is a loop of commemoration and death that permeates this work, both in the references to the still-life genre and in the fact that the sculptor killed these creatures in the first place, long before carving this de facto memorial. In the 17th century, vanitas still-life paintings portrayed the abundance of natural life and worldly goods to celebrate this abundance while pointing to the fact that it was only transient, just as life itself is. The title 'Killing time' refers to this sense of life stilled in art, to the act of remembering and recording something from the artist's past, and to the time spent on carving this labour-intensive sculpture.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Killing Time - Ricky Swallow 1:13

Shown in 8 exhibitions

Killing Time, Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo, 24 Feb 2004-20 Mar 2004

Killing Time, Gertrude Contemporary, Fitzroy, 02 Apr 2004-01 May 2004

This time another year: Venice Biennale 2005, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, 12 Jun 2005-06 Nov 2005

Ricky Swallow, P.S.1, New York, 19 Jan 2006-20 Mar 2006

Ricky Swallow: The Bricoleur, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 15 Oct 2009-28 Feb 2010

21st century: art in the first decade, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 18 Dec 2010-26 Apr 2011

Still life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 Jul 2013-23 Apr 2014

Beyond Belief: the Sublime in Contemporary Art, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst, 31 Mar 2017-04 Jun 2017

Obsession: devil in the detail, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 30 Nov 2018-17 Feb 2019

Referenced in 16 publications

Other works by Ricky Swallow

Title

Artist

Date

2003-2004

Media category

Sculpture

Materials used

laminated Jelutong, maple

Dimensions

108.0 x 184.0 x 118.0 cm (irreg.)

Credit

Rudy Komon Memorial Fund and the Contemporary Collection Benefactors 2004

Location

Not on display

Accession number

125.2004

Copyright

© Ricky Swallow. Courtesy Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney Reproduction requests

Artist information

Ricky Swallow
Works in the collection

4

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In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact. More recently he has made carvings of the animate and inanimate conceived and realised at a ratio of 1:1. 'Killing time' is the most ambitious work that Swallow has made to date and is likely to remain so for some time due to the onerous and time-consuming physical task of working in such detail on this scale. It was the centrepiece of Swallow's solo exhibition at the Australian Pavilion in the 2005 Venice Biennale.

While 'Killing time' visually recalls 17th-century Dutch still-life painting and even the work of such a virtuoso illusionist woodcarver as Grinling Gibbons, the subject matter is derived from Swallow's personal experience. The son of a fisherman, he has faithfully depicted every sea creature that he recalls capturing, killing and eating during his life. The various fish, lobsters, oysters, crabs and others are displayed on a table which duplicates the table around which Swallow's family ate dinner. While 'Killing time' uses the visual language of a particular genre of painting and wood-carving, it is also an intensely personal act of remembering; it is another 'evaporated self-portrait' as Swallow has described his sculptures, which call on specific personal memories while also having a commonly recognisable subject matter.

'Killing time' is carved mainly from laminated jelutong, a pale coloured hardwood used commercially for prototypes and pattern-making but also by woodworking hobbyists for whittling. The illusionism of the sculpture is emphasised by the attention to detail in the lobster, the lemon peel that hangs over the edge of the table and the rippling folds of the tablecloth pushed to one end. However the monochromatic timber and the dramatic side-lighting, devised by Swallow to create strong shadows and highlights, point to the inherent unreality of transcribing animate form into inanimate materials. There is a loop of commemoration and death that permeates this work, both in the references to the still-life genre and in the fact that the sculptor killed these creatures in the first place, long before carving this de facto memorial. In the 17th century, vanitas still-life paintings portrayed the abundance of natural life and worldly goods to celebrate this abundance while pointing to the fact that it was only transient, just as life itself is. The title 'Killing time' refers to this sense of life stilled in art, to the act of remembering and recording something from the artist's past, and to the time spent on carving this labour-intensive sculpture.

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006

Killing Time - Ricky Swallow 1:13

Shown in 8 exhibitions

Killing Time, Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo, 24 Feb 2004-20 Mar 2004

Killing Time, Gertrude Contemporary, Fitzroy, 02 Apr 2004-01 May 2004

This time another year: Venice Biennale 2005, Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, 12 Jun 2005-06 Nov 2005

Ricky Swallow, P.S.1, New York, 19 Jan 2006-20 Mar 2006

Ricky Swallow: The Bricoleur, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 15 Oct 2009-28 Feb 2010

21st century: art in the first decade, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 18 Dec 2010-26 Apr 2011

Still life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 Jul 2013-23 Apr 2014

Beyond Belief: the Sublime in Contemporary Art, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst, 31 Mar 2017-04 Jun 2017

Obsession: devil in the detail, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 30 Nov 2018-17 Feb 2019

Referenced in 16 publications

Other works by Ricky Swallow

Stair with contents Ricky Swallow 2.2015.a-c

Come together Ricky Swallow 56.2021

Picture a screaming sculpture Ricky Swallow L2010.75

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Killing Time, 2003-2004 by Ricky Swallow

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In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX ...

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Review of Killing Time
Listen to the audio about this work but be sure to use your headphones!

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Killing Time, (2003-2004) by Ricky Swallow :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 'Killing time' Ricky Swallow has synthesised his interests in time passing, personal and collective memory, everyday experiences and the history of art. Swallow's earlier sculptures were often carefully crafted duplicates of recently retro items, such as beatboxes and BMX bikes, or reworked record turntables with scaled-down narrative scenarios that blend science fiction and scientific fact.

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Killing Time