Jet Swan
Material
‘Material’ by Jet Swan is published by Loose Joints. © Jet Swan 2021 courtesy Loose Joints.
British artist Jet Swan’s first monograph collects together the last three years of the artist’s engagement with members of the public through impromptu studio spaces, such as an empty shopfront inside a commercial mall in Scarborough, northeast England, and a repurposed community hall in Ramsgate, Kent, where the artist lives and works.
Material balances the public identities nurtured and maintained by those who pass through her studios against darker, intimate photographic spaces, contrasting private and tactile images of the body with photographs that skirt around the margins of conventional staged portraiture. Swan taps into a uniquely British vein of magical social realism; close-cropped, made-up faces with lost gazes intertwine with flesh-coloured tights; a hand grips tight a soda bottle; a wide-eyed baby floats in the void, a cut torso reveals the contours and traces of a private moment. Material is accompanied by a new text by acclaimed poet Rachael Allen.
Jet Swan, Material
Loose Joints, 2021
160 pages, 195 × 242 mm, 100 photos
Clothbound silkscreened hardcover
Text by Rachael Allen
‘Material’ by Jet Swan is published by Loose Joints. © Jet Swan 2021 courtesy Loose Joints.
‘Material’ by Jet Swan is published by Loose Joints. © Jet Swan 2021 courtesy Loose Joints.
‘Material’ by Jet Swan is published by Loose Joints. © Jet Swan 2021 courtesy Loose Joints.
‘Material’ by Jet Swan is published by Loose Joints. © Jet Swan 2021 courtesy Loose Joints.