Vessel

Swindell’s miniature ceramics explore a preciousness of object, the artist creating vessels at a reduced scale and with a delicacy and softness that attenuates each pot down to a natural, almost shell-like form. This sensation, in part, is created through the use of a porcelain body with paper-thin wheel-thrown walls (given residual strength through a high temperature firing) onto which Swindell applies varieties of textural depth and blushing colour glazes. Within this set the biological motif is undermined by a curious unfamiliarity and sense of exoticism — the decorative elements rooted in a fantasy that bridges abstraction with the familiar organic patterns, and finds an particular intensity in the otherworldly imagination and conveyed sense of movement.