Background
Niamh Swan is a New England-based artist and metalsmith working in watercolor, metal, and fiber, sometimes all at once. Her background is heavily steeped in music and she turned to the visual arts in her twenties when illness prevented continuing further in music. Since that time, she has studied the making of art on her own, drawing on a childhood full of painting and needlearts and acquiring new skills such as blacksmithing/metalsmithing.
Niamh’s work has been presented in individual and group shows, including Nasty Women Exhibition at Knockdown 2016. Her pieces can be found in private collections on the East and West coasts as well as in independent shops now and then. Her work has been described as dreamy, surreal, mythical, spiritual, and always traveling the borders between surreal, abstract, and visionary art.
Artist’s Statement
Oh boy, is it a long story. Bear with me.
My brain seems to work a little differently from most. It’s got its challenges, that is for certain. I crave clarity in everything, but it’s a beast which rarely raises its head for me. Things most folks seem to grok cleanly leave me wondering which of the nine million things my mind says “could be” is actually the case. So over a lifetime of making all kinds of art, from my beginnings devoted to music, through decades exploring the visual arts, I have found myself moving from trying to understand the outside, to appreciating what is going on inside my own being and bringing that out in my work.
I am fortunate to have always had art in my life. I grew up on a farm in upstate New York and my family were equal parts pragmatic, rational, artistic, very spiritual. I was always encouraged to learn all I could, and to make art of all kinds. I learned foraging, preserving, farming, but I also learned languages, drawing, painting, needlework of all sorts. I danced constantly. I followed a natural leaning toward music and excelled and trained for a career in music. Music fell casualty to severe illness in my twenties, leaving me devastated in every way possible and looking for a way out of the soul crushing jobs I now had to work. Years of art as medicine for all of this turned out to be the thing I was looking for.
My work comes from a place that I have a very hard time describing in words. It’s surreal certainly. It is by turns abstract and visionary. It comes from the places I take my spirit to to learn, to journey and explore, to show others what is going on in my own being as I try to understand everything I can.
Watercolors and crayons were the first media that I had to work with and they have stuck with me my whole life. I love watercolor for its flow, its dance of clarity and obfuscation, its responsiveness, and closeness to natural elements. Crayons, colored pencil, ink, acrylic paint , wax, oil, all provide fascinating resists to the watercolors.
Metal is a whole other world, and probably my favorite. I was introduced to blacksmithing by my brother, at the age of forty. And I think it may have saved my sanity. I currently do not have space in which to do metalwork, but I am hoping that changes in the near future.
This is about as concise as it gets.
Thank you for the ramble,
Niamh Swan