Time Crunch
It isn’t always easy to keep up with the fast pace of modern society. This fairy must have somehow managed to wriggle his way through the clockworks, but now he’s trapped, and is feeling the pressure.
Sculpted in polymer clay over a wire armature.
Currently at The Creative Space in Barrie, ON.
$120 CDN
Set your calendars!
The Lakeshore Mews is holding a Handmade Market on Saturdays in June.
The Market opens on June 9th and runs from noon ‘til 4 p.m.
Gavy will be there with lots of new critters along with Elizabeth Young, Catherine Cua, and Becca Lynn.
Control
As an experiment this little creature is being kept separate from his brother. He is eating a regular diet of moths, spiders, berries, and mushrooms while his brother is being fed chiefly berries. There has been no apparent change in him, although his brother’s wings have turned red from the berries.
A Fairy Diet
I am keeping this little fellow separate from his brother (I found them both on a stroll through the forest) and am feeding him a diet of red berries while his brother gets a varied diet. His wings have turned red, apparently from the berries, and I am curious to observe whether in a few months’ time his hair and skin will follow.
Currently at Mad and Noisy Gallery, www.madandnoisy.com
Trickster Writing Elf:
The trickster character is an archetype found in literature from many cultures. This elf was commissioned by a writer as a special writing companion…though I have a feeling that the wee trickster will cause a good share of mischief if left unsupervised!
NFS—Commissioned
Sugar Imp
Our infestation of imps has caused every bag of sugar we buy to go hard within a week. They get into it no matter how well we seal it, and they sit in there and feast. On the bright side, they will get rid of kitchen moths faster than any exterminator, so perhaps they are worth the trouble.
Floriated
One evening I was scrutinizing an illuminated manuscript. It is painstaking work to handle such old materials. My eyes were bleary and my stomach empty, and I had decided to call it a night when this strange fey hopped right off the page.
Titivillus:
Late one night while working on an esssay, I caught this fat little demon running around on my desk. I picked him up by the tale and demanded to know what he was up to. He told me that his name was Titivillus, and its his very special and delightful job to introduce errors into manuscripts and to collect and gobble up any mistakes he can find in written work. He has, he giggled, been confounding humanity for thousands of years.
In the Middle Ages Titivillus says he was a meagre, scrawny little thing because the only errors he could get were in manuscripts, and those were hard for people to produce. But in today’s world of the internet and text messages, he has grown very plump indeed.
I put him in a jar and now I blame him for all of my typografical errors, and for the mistakes that slip by in a copy edit or proof read.
It’s my believe that Titivillus is quite happy to live in his jar. I feed him daily on error-ridden scraps of paper.
$300 CDN (Currently at the Mad and Noisy Gallery, www.madanadnoisy.com)
Mark your calendars!
Conveyed: visual interactions between art and text
April 7th to April 30th, 2012
Creemore, Ontario, Canada.
Gavy Swan will be among 7 artists featured in Conveyed at the Mad & Noisy Gallery.
Artist Statement:
Barrie artist Gavy Swan uses polymer clay and mixed media to explore classification and containment in language. Her figurative sculptures evoke imaginative narratives while exploring the undercurrents of a scientific and linguistic understanding of the world.
