Eleanor Swordy: Say Less

Eleanor Swordy’s (b. 1987) painterly oeuvre plays with notions of quotidian narratives and the formal qualities of figuration. With an illusory plasticity of form and shape, Swordy’s intricate rendering of textures and materials present themselves on close inspection. Smooth areas of paint are opposed with mosaic-like details; horizons and vantage points are contorted to unravel unforeseeable compositional possibilities. Structured like a musical piece, Swordy’s work underlies a lyrical rhythm that redefines rules of perception, perspective and space.

The artist’s dream-like environments are inhabited by otherworldly protagonists; twisted, angled and warped across the works like malleable playdough, they are caught in the maelstrom of daily life. The voluptuous figures are often decentralised and nudged to the edges of the canvas, employed by Swordy as a stylistic tool to ‘hold the space and to guide your eye around the image’. With an acute sensibility to art history, an empathetic gaze and technical finesse, Swordy subjects the human body to diagrammatical rules, capturing human experience in abstracted form.

E. Swordy in conversation with M. Vogel, ‘Eleanor Swordy combines Memory with Imagination’, in Art of Choice, 20 September 2019