A multidisciplinary artist in Gibsons has revealed the stories behind some of her most charismatic three-dimensional characters.
Coralie Swaney is a New Zealand-born painter who in 1997 began crafting idiosyncratic figures out of polymer clay. Two months ago, Swaney released four self-published volumes that document the imagined backstories of her models, from a gap-toothed senior ice hockey player to a gray-haired wedding crasher adorned in a leopard-skin coat.
“My characters have always had a narrative attached to them,” said Swaney. “It was a matter of finding the stories that I had written with each character when they sold, or when they were put on show, and pairing them again to the images.”
Many of Swaney’s characters — which can stand up to 60 centimetres in height — were inspired by real people, tempered by a healthy dose of her imagination and liberal exaggeration. Others, like the members of her Flights of Fancy series, are based on literary or mythical figures.
After uncovering artificial icicles in a collection of Christmas decorations, she devised the beaming physiognomy of Jack Frost. The icicles form a sawtoothed hairline; he carries a miniature brush and paint pot. “He gave me the perfect excuse to indulge in my inclination to sculpt large noses,” Swaney observed. In a diorama originally fashioned for a display at the Vancouver Public Library, Shakespeare’s jester Trinculo recoils at the sight of the ogre-like Caliban, cowering under a checkered cloak.
Calculated embellishment transforms Swaney’s models from amusing tableaux into canny social commentary. Her jowly version of the supercilious Grand Old Duke of York is bedecked in such extravagant military regalia that his eyes seem to droop at the prospect of marching back up the hill. In her accompanying text, Swaney describes the duke’s charge as a rescue mission to rescue Mr. H. Dumpty. (“Efforts to revive him were an embarrassing failure,” she adds.)
“People look at those characters and they either see themselves or they see their Great Uncle Joe or their sister or their grandma,” said Swaney. “They resonate and there’s nostalgia in there too. That stuff is super important, but more than anything what comes through the years is that they make people smile. It’s the idiosyncrasies and the character traits that people connect to.”
The characters who populate Swaney’s books are linked by broad themes and styles of design. In Painted Ladies, hand-crafted heads surmount wooden triangular bodies painstakingly illustrated in the style of master painters. Vivienne, a ginger-haired owner of a Cadillac convertible, wears the likeness of Vincent Van Gough’s sunflower series. Pia, who sports crimson shoes and a matching beret, is adorned in a surrealist frock, a tribute to Pablo Picasso. “She aspires to visit all of the great art museums of the world,” Swaney writes.
In one of the books — A Fictional Family Tree — bas-relief characters are linked by genealogical ties that span three centuries. In Swaney’s telling, the fictional Wyndham family tree culminates with a single scion and heir: a haughty cat adorned in a bow tie.
“This [storytelling] was easy,” said Swaney, “because I often had a kind of narrative in mind that informed the physical sculpting of the characters, and the physical characteristics emerged based on that narrative.”
The four booklets — A Cast of Characters, Flights of Fancy, The Painted Ladies and A Fictional Family Tree are available for purchase directly from Swaney’s Smiling Seagull art studio, reachable online via coralieswaney.com.
