Richard Swanson
About the Artist
Richard Swanson maintains two studios–a pottery, for making utilitarian and sculptural vessels, and a warehouse space, where he works on multi-media sculpture for museum installations, landscape installations and dance collaborations. He resides in Helena, Montana–a mountain town of much sunshine and an atmosphere of support and encouragement for the arts. His wife Penny Price Swanson, is an artist and art educator. Their son Alex is a video/social network game designer for a Disney owned company in Eugene, Oregon.
Richard’s first professional training was in psychobiology, a field dedicated to exploring the physical basis of memory. A casual pottery lesson from a friend led to an intense period of self-teaching and a career as a studio potter–later expanded to include ceramic sculpture. In 1974 he came to Helena, Montana as a resident at the Archie Bray Foundation, an internationally recognized ceramic center. An interest in working large scale with materials other than clay led him back to graduate school at the University of Montana–this time in art–where he undertook the first of several sculpture/dance collaborations with Amy Ragsdale, choreographer and art director of the Montana Transport Company.
Since obtaining his MFA from the University of Montana in 1994, his work has been honored with several major grants and awards, including a Montana Art Council Individual Fellowship, Art Matters Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, Helena Presents Individual Artist Grant and a New Forms: Regional Initiative Grant. His many large scale works have found permanent homes in the Northwest and beyond. Several of his public art commissions have become the defining visual symbol for cultural institutions including the Myrna Loy Center, the University of Montana-Helena, and the Holter Museum of Art, all in his home town, as well as the Medford Educational Facility in Medford, Oregon. His figurative clay vessels are featured in many books and magazines and have homes in such prestigious institutions as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs in Washington, D.C.
Artist Statement
The diverse nature of my sculptural output is due in part to my penchant for exploring new materials. In work created between 1994 and 2000 I utilize the natural tendencies of materials such as burdock (wants to clump) and straw (wants to scatter) but also persuade them to do the unexpected– insubstantial materials totter skyward, solid metal pieces rock or sway with the slightest touch or breeze. Other materials are coaxed to balance, toplike, or soar in an arching sequence of repetitive forms reminiscent of timelapse images.
The rhythms set up by these interactions of form and space are of perpetual interest to me and constitute a major part of my aesthetic. Use of an installation format allows me to extend these rhythmic interactions, engaging an entire space with forms rising from the floor, springing from the walls and suspended from the ceiling. I want the viewer to feel a sense of enchantment upon entering a truly novel environment.
Collaborations with choreographers are a natural extension of these sculptural explorations. Dancers animate the sculptures and the sculptures allow the dancers to move in unfamiliar ways, encouraging both sculptor and dancer to explore new rhythmic possibilities, while adding dimension to an age old concern of the sculptor–that of breathing life into inanimate material.
Scissors and paper are the design tools for my “cutout” series of metal sculptures created between 2000 and 2004. In a spontaneous process of folding and expanding shapes cut from paper both volume and negative space are created simultaneously, resulting in unexpected new forms. Out of myriad paper designs I pick a few of the most successful to scale up in metal.
Large-scale metal works begun in 2005 create rhythms that are more eccentric than in previous work. I think of as these as three dimensional ink drawings or as jazz phrases–no hidden meanings, just something pure, lyrical, and sometimes loopy, with the interval between notes as essential as the notes themselves.
The intimate scale of new metal works begun in 2013 make possible a level of spontaneity harder to achieve at a large scale. This manifests itself in freer use of color, form, line and sometimes pure silliness. They are akin to poetic phrases that suggest a little story or dream fragment.