Wendy Swallow
Lives and works in London
Wendy Swallow is an applied artist whose background is in printmaking. Using glass as her signature material, she creates beautiful pieces which involve the viewer in a similar relationship to that of a reader to a book. The use of text is crucial to Wendy, and many of her works look at the disintegration of words through the analogy of sandblasting processes and the physical erosion of glass.
For the group exhibition Pistol, Wendy’s exhibits included two very enticing ‘glass books’ which stand out in the darkened space on the first floor. In sixty minutes she has etched one hours worth of speaking-clock transcriptions onto glass, producing a weighty testament to a period of time. Also working with glass, Lucy Harrison’s paperweights and glass bottles magnify the text placed inside or underneath. Her work is concerned with language and often with how it fails; lack of communication or understanding. From Getxo to North Shields are bottles full of bits of language that don’t work properly, either through being in the wrong country, being unreadable, being questions with no answers or vice versa. Some of the phrases are referring to a detective story, as a lot of her work is carried out in that way: overhearing and magnifying small pieces of information.
Wendy attended the Slade College of Art, and is currently pursuing a successful practice in London.
Pistol
