A love of form and the outdoors flows through the pieces at artist denise swift’s new display at the Showcase Gallery.
“It’s a conglomeration of the multitudes of media that I play in,” she says.
The Canim Lake-based Metis artist’s body of work is sometimes playful, sometimes spiritual, ranging from clay characters to carved faces pulled from bark, to paintings evoking vast landscapes.
Prominent in the collection are faces: bark carvings, clay busts and paintings.
“I can’t seem to stop trying to grasp faces,” she says. “I don’t know whether they are just in my mind or what, because it’s not people I know or people I see. They’re just there.”
Swift works in a number of different mediums, raku fired, as well as more conventional pottery and sculpting, painting and wood carvings.
“Since I was a child I always wanted to do pottery and then get all the stuff to do it. Then, as I got older, I wanted to try carving and then I wanted to try painting and then I wanted to try everything, so this is what is the result of all of it.”
Often out camping when she works with wood, swift will leave faces carved into wood pokers for other campers to find.
Now retired, swift says she is always learning.
“I’m always striving to be better,” she says. “It’s learning everything you do, you’re learning and learning and learning. It’s like a never-ending learning curve.”
Swift enjoys taking courses by other artists, funded by sales from her own work.
“The best thing about doing art is being able to go and learn from other people,” she says.
“Other people inspire me because their stuff is so wonderful and so good and I always feel so inadequate.”
However, she notes, she feels different when she sees her body of work together.
“I kind of go, oh, well, maybe it’s not so bad,” she says with a laugh, adding that she hopes people enjoy her work.
While swift also displays her artwork in a small gallery at her home in Canim Lake, her work is on display at the Showcase Gallery located in the South Cariboo Business Centre until June 29.