Today we’d like to introduce you to Marilu Swett.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I am a Boston based artist with no real exposure to art until College. I think this is why I dual-majored in studio painting and art education. Because I am enamored of materials (I love stuff) I have taken courses in many diverse media, from surface design and lithography to welding, foundry and fiber. Today, my current studio practice is split between drawing and sculpture.
Please tell us about your art.
My sculptures and drawings allude to natural systems and subsystems, microscopic, telluric and oceanic form, the human body, and industrial artifacts. I have lately been looking at the ocean and its littoral variety with pleasure and concern, with a strong interest in our history with and debt to it. I cast, draw, scrub, carve, cut, tool, dye and paint materials to produce complex drawings and forms in plastic, resin, lead, bronze, rubber and mixed media. I sometimes include found objects. The work is serious and fanciful, abstracting, inventing, and drawing relationships among forms.
My drawings include ideas about form, but also about the process of drawing itself, and about seeing as experience. Both endeavors employ abstract imagery rooted in a fascination with the biological and mechanical workings of the world. The drawings use black and white line, which, when I layer on vellum or cut and collage, I experience increasingly as an act of sculpture.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
I remember an artist telling me a long time ago to “stay in business”, that is, keep on making things, maintain your studio practice and connection to your work. I can only repeat that advice. Make studio time a priority, even as life gets busy and demanding.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I show my work at the Boston Sculptors Gallery with a solo show coming in May 2019. Currently, I have drawings at the DeCordova Museum’s Cafe, The Peabody Essex Museum’s show Wild Designs through May 2019, and in the Sculpture Walk on Lake Winnepesaukee in Meredith, NH. for 1 year.
Contact Info:
- Address: 14 Spring Park Ave in Jamaica Plain
- Website: mariluswett.com
- Phone: 6175246215
- Email: mariluswett14@gmail.com
- Instagram: swettmarilu
Image Credit:
Photo Credit Stewart Clements
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