Current - APW Gallery Exhibition

APW Beverley Shelton Artist Fellowship Exhibition
Heather B. Swann - Mysteriosa

 21 March - 16 May 2026

Australian Print Workshop is delighted to present Mysteriosa an exhibition of original prints by renowned contemporary artist Heather B. Swann. Awarded the prestigious APW Beverley Shelton Artist Fellowship, Heather undertook a residency at APW in late 2025 and worked in collaboration with APW’s team of highly skilled printers to create this suite of nine exquisite original lithographs.

As a young artist I often wondered why so many artists were fascinated by the subject of memory. Now that I am older I understand entirely, memory becomes something to hold onto, the receptacle for all that we have been and seen and done, a mixing cup. And more, by now we have gleaned that we all contain some of the world’s memories and sorrows and we clearly understand that all will be lost. Art can cherish this knowledge for us.
Heather B. Swann, March 2026

Heather B. Swann is a Tasmanian artist. Her drawings, sculptures and paintings are often vectors of feeling, distillations of intense emotion. Her human, animal and architectural bodies are animated by an uncanny, almost surrealist sensibility, by an imaginative, very contemporary response to the European tradition and its underlying mythologies.

Her work was shown in Magic Object, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2016; in Nervous, a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia 2016; I let my body fall into a rhythm at BUoY Arts Centre in Tokyo 2018; Leda and the Swan at the TarraWarra Museum of Art 2021 and again in The National 4 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2023. Place for sea dreamers, a sculptural collaboration with architect Nonda Katsalidis was commissioned for the 2022 Setouchi Trienniale and is now part of their permanent public collection on Teshima, Japan. More recently have been new commissions for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery - an installation Do not forgive me for their exhibition Twist 2023; for the group exhibition From the other side at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 2023; the major sculpture Ouroboros for the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial 2023 and Last Night on Earth for Inner Sanctum, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2024. Heather is currently working towards another new commission, an award from the Copyright Agency to make an exhibition for the University of New South Wales Galleries for September 2026. Heather’s work is collected in private and public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art and Heide Museum of Modern Art.
 

                                                     Prints by Heather B. Swann available through APW Printstore

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Mysteriosa

An invitation to work with master printers is a dream that I have been waiting to have realised for more than thirty years. I said this to APW printers Martin King and Simon White on my first day of the APW Beverely Shelton Artist Fellowship at the Australian Print Workshop and they both laughed. Seriously though, I do love the various print media, I studied etching as an undergraduate at the Tasmanian School of Art in the late 1990s under Milan Milojevic. The structure inherent in the print making processes gave me an invaluable foundation for becoming an artist.

And as soon as I finished my last year studying in the wonderful printmaking studio overlooking the River Derwent in Hobart, I did not make another print. The culprit was patience. Or more correctly it was my own impatience. Through the rigorous practice enforced in that printmaking studio I had begun to draw and to compose images and equally importantly, to think conceptually about making art. I was busting with ideas, with things to say, with the thrill of finding a way to navigate the world. So then I was on speed, drawing is immediate and I found it instantly satisfying. Etching had taught me the value of an enriched line, a blurry line, a scratchy line, different thicknesses of line and etching also gave me a deep appreciation for black, even messy black, inky blacks. The etching process had taught me that changes could be made through the different states of the evolving copper plates and I translated this to using rich Sennelier black ink to redeem my errors and make shifts in drawings with big black scratchy ink clouds and messy blobs and blots, echoing my embrace of the delicious foul bitten surfaces of my student etchings.

And here we are, some thirty years later, I have after all been patient.

Yes, I was waiting for this invitation, quietly, developing my own vocabulary, negotiating the fine skill of composition, learning to distil intense feelings and emotions into objects and onto sheets of paper. I walked in to the two weeks of this fellowship with little preparation, no plan except that perhaps I should make an address to my upcoming exhibition at the UNSW Galleries in September this year. And then I was swept up and off my feet with the magical technique of lithography. The weather was hot and I was shown that lithography depends on puddles of water, it was perfect. I puddled in the water with the tusche and used crayons for the first time ever and these new lithographs really just flowed through my fingers; they each depend on something of the various threads developed over all these years of practice. And I realise now that this methodology was just right for the exhibition The Forests of Symbols.

In 2024 I decided to make one exhibition for the rest of my life - The Forests of Symbols -  in different variations and places. My guiding principle is a realisation that I know the world through symbols. Much more though than recognising common symbols and signs and metaphors, knowing or reading the world symbolically means that any phenomena can take on new meaning and significance for anyone and at any time. It was when I realised this that I blossomed as an artist, shifting meaning is what artists can do, playing with our understanding of the world is what makes art sing. This way of seeing and knowing and creating is, of course, one of the well-recognised tools for poets and artists, I am not saying anything new here. And, again of course, many artists do not see the world through this frame at all.

However, I do. The phrase, the forests of symbols, comes from a poem by Charles Baudelaire. He was perennially lost in forests of symbols and looking for something to hold onto, he thought any old thing might be a god. All I am saying here is that any old thing you pick up in the forests might come to mean something, and might even become something to hold onto, this is enough rationale for me to make art.
Heather B. Swann, March 2026

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Exhibition continues until Saturday 16 May 2026 
APW Gallery: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.