Zina Swanson: The First Stick I Collected Was a Tree

It's true that the first stick I collected was a tree

It was on Blenheim Road in Otāutahi

I didn't drive at the time but I made James do a U-turn

It looked lonely

Dumped in an industrial area

We hired a trailer and took it to the gallery

It was too big to get up the stairs in one piece

So we had to saw it up, in the stairwell, into three pieces

Three sticks

It felt mean

But I put it back together

The sticks in these paintings are dead and dry

Carefully chosen

Separated from their parent plant

Placed in scenarios that suggest domestic situations

Scenarios that suggest life

Scenarios that want to be alive

Shoes

The shoe fits

But obviously it doesn't

Thermometers at full temp

But the stick is obviously not overheating

Bracelets on a stick wrist

A separated limb

Bits of me wrapped around bits of sticks

Washing instructions

From MY clothes

Forcing bits of me onto bits of them

Them

Making them part of my life, by making them part of my paintings

Making a special shelf for them in my studio

The collection keeps growing

Sticks with grafts
Sticks with accessories

The first stick I collected was a tree

Zina Swanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations draw on plant-related lore, and while they’re often humorous and uncanny they also hint at a darker view of humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Her paintings are detailed, precise. The visual pleasure of her use of repetition is also undeniable: a silhouette of a head composed of pressed forget me not flowers; a skirting of blades of grass and “fake” four-leaf clovers that rings the gallery; two walls of painted freckled noses appearing to close in on a blooming tiger lily. Though take a step back from this last work, and the noses collectively could be mistaken for a pair of menacing wasp nests. Swanson aims to unsettle. Her practice has an ongoing relationship with several texts including Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird’s infamous The Secret Life of Plants (1973), Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells (2003) by CIA lie-detector specialist Cleve Backster, and Animal and Plant Lore (1899). What Swanson has in common with these “pioneers” of plant research is an inquisitiveness bordering on suspicion in the beauty, complexity, and potential of plants. Still, there is always a human presence in her works—the outline of a face, noses, a hand—or something that suggests a human has been here: a window, neatly arranged sticks. These works are often smaller in scale, though this is one of their strengths. They’re scaled for an interaction with the viewer that is personal, intimate, and so wonderfully unnerving.

Zina Swanson (b. 1981, Christchurch, New Zealand) lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand. She has exhibited extensively with solo and group presentations at most of New Zealand’s top galleries and museums. These include the Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, City Gallery Wellington and Artspace Aotearoa. Her works are also held in the collections of the Wallace Arts Trust, Christchurch Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery and The Dowse Art Museum, and she has been the recipient of the prestigious Frances Hodgkins Fellowship, and in 2014 was an Apexart New York Inbound Resident.