Ricky Swallow - Come Together (2002)
“Sculptural realism's paradoxical power is to conjure presence in absence, lightness in weight, the softness of flesh or fabric in stone or wood. Come Together (2002) is Swallow's hard-core homage to Baroque realism and its apparitions of the soft in the hard. Rudolph Wittkower's big book on the Baroque master Gianlorenzo Bernini is never far away in Swallow's studio, and Come Together is a knee-high tribute to the meeting of skull and baldachin in Bernini's Tomb of Pope Alexander VII. Call it a rec-room entombment. The bag sits there in a frozen slump, on initial viewing no more than a banal, 1970s suburban object, and you need to get close to see the embedded skull. You don't see it, though, so much as take its weight; it's an indisputable object. The first impression of a plummeting impact- the skull winding the bag like a meteorite - is pushed back by the illusion of a geologically slow entrapment from below, as if the bag grew into shape around the skull.
In this, the second carving he made, Swallow seems torn between the attempt to renovate the vanitas still life in all its pathos, and the impulse to mock the seriousness of that attempt by burying the skull in its own plinth. Since the seventeenth century in Holland, a time and place newly glutted with objects, still life has been used to calibrate the life of things and the lives of those who own them - to measure shelf-life against after-life. Four hundred years since the genre's heyday, in a period so design drunk and object-fetishising that it makes gilded-age Amsterdam look frugal, Swallow began to import his cargo of lifestyle objects into wood’s peculiar time-zone.”
From Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings by Justin Paton
