Another Eden: Ruby Swinney’s ‘Human Nature’

Published on ArtThrob, 25 September 2018.

“Swinney’s work, I believe, is too easily dismissed; too easily passed off as whimsical, a word which has become less description than demerit. A line from Laura Riding Jackson’s The Tiger, a poem included in the exhibition, echoes familiar criticisms. ‘So white,’ it reads, ‘so out of time, so story-like.’ And perhaps it is all these things, but is also something else besides. For it seems imagination as form has lost favour in contemporary art, now overshadowed by the conceptual, the narrative, and the documentary. Indeed, Swinney’s paintings are an anomaly in a museum known for its blockbuster art, with its high-gloss finishes and large-scale everything.”

Read the full review here.