In-Conversation: Heather B. Swann & Elspeth Pitt

Learn more about the practice of artist Heather B. Swann in conversation with Elspeth Pitt, Senior Curator, Australian Art, at the National Gallery of Australia. Together they will discuss Swann's major exhibition 'The Forests of Symbols' at UNSW Galleries.

'The Forests of Symbols' is an ambitious new project conceived as the first in a final series to be completed during Swann’s lifetime. Bringing together newly commissioned and rarely seen works in sculpture, painting, and drawing, the exhibition considers symbolism as a way of knowing the world.

Swann and Pitt will reflect on the ideas, imagery, and symbolic language that underpin the exhibition, exploring how mythology, allegory, and natural history continue to shape the artist's practice.

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Heather B. Swann has established a formidable reputation as a maker of sculptural objects and ink drawings of dark, sensual, and fantastic presence. With influences ranging widely across themes and imagery drawn from museum culture, history, mythology, and natural science, Swann works outwards from the poetics of intimate sensation, emotion, and thought. She is closely engaged with both the eternal present of perception and her own world of feeling, as well as making allusion to the particular crises of our troubled times. Her project is the translation of such fleeting phenomenological observations into form. Swann’s figurative reflexes often produce images of human or animal bodies, semblances of life kinked by surrealist convulsion and an instinct for abstraction.

Elspeth Pitt is Senior Curator, Australian Art, at the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra. She has previously written on Heather B. Swann’s work in essays including ‘Leda’, which accompanied Swann’s 2021 exhibition at the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Elspeth has held curatorial, honorary research, and academic roles at The University of Adelaide, Australian National University, Art Gallery of South Australia, British Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University, Naarm/Melbourne, considering the work of the Australian artist Bea Maddock.

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Presented in conjunction with 'Heather B. Swann: The Forests of Symbols' at UNSW Galleries from 3 September – 22 November 2026. Curated by José Da Silva and presented as part of Copyright Agency Partnerships, an annual commissioning series for leading Australian artists to develop and present a major new body of work.