This is the work of Caledonia Curry, aka 'Swoon', a contemporary American artist who was born in Connecticut in 1977 and raised in Florida. Swoon works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers on the transformative capacity of art, as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis (Tate, 2020).
A work by Swoon in Berlin.
Swoon received artistic training at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1998 - 2001. She felt disappointed by the career advice she received there; she found it too traditional and restricting. She chose instead to focus on making her work accessible to ordinary people. She pasted her drawings onto the side of buildings, so that everyone could see them. She also joined activist groups including GRUB; an organisation that provided the homeless with food rescued from dumpsters.
Swoon at the Pop Tech conference 2014. Camden, Maine.
The image below is from her exhibition 'Submerged Motherlands', which was at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. For this exhibition, Swoon created a site-specific installation in the Rotunda Gallery, transforming it into a fantastic landscape centering on a 60 foot sculptural tree with a constructed enviroment at its base. She included sculpted boats and rafts, figurative prints and drawings, and cut paper foliage. The work is essentially about climate change, rising seas and the dislocation of communities.
SWOON: Submerged Motherlands, Brooklyn Museum 2014 Photo: Tod Seelie.
In the foreground of this picture, there is a small gazebo like structure which has been inspirational to me. It represents a temple and reminded me of a cave/womb/tomb. My recent research (and dissertation) has been about a paleolithic 'Venus' figurine which was found in the cave at Hohle Fels, and seeing this got me wondering if there was some way to create or suggest a cave in the presentation of my forthcoming studio works.
I like the idea of the audience entering the 'cave/temple' and discovering the artworks at the back of the cave, in 'the inner sanctum,' which suggests something valuable/hidden/sacred. Then, spending some time within the cave, experiencing the artwork in this enclosed, sacred space. Finally, retracing their steps back out of the cave into the daylight, a little changed by the experience - a symbolic rebirth. There is something primative, ritualistic and quite magical about this. It also resonates with my message for this body of work, which is about women and goddesses being hidden away, almost invisible, trapped in the shadows or behind closed doors.
I am not sure about the practicalities of the cave/temple idea at the moment, but it is something I will give more thought to and discuss with my tutor, when we're back in college next week.
References
Tate (2020) Swoon born 1977. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/swoon-12478 (Accessed 3rd March 2021).
Brooklyn Museum (2014) Swoon, Submerged Motherlands [YouTube] 11 April 2014. Available at: https://youtu.be/oRyvMpeWuMA (Accessed 3rd March 2021).
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