Artist Bio

As a multidisciplinary artist, Jayne McSwiney’s practice is driven by concept. Each idea chooses its own language, and she follows where it leads. Taking personal experience as a starting point, her recent work often begins with found objects, places and situations.

Satellite internet is installed in an abandoned house, its Wi-Fi network named after the patron saint of the internet. A crashed Holden bumper, retrieved from a roadside thorn bush, is partially resprayed from factory silver into repentance purple. A found birthday banner taken from a freeway bridge is tailored into a boxing jacket. A hooned out tyre is gold leafed and turned into an incense burner, releasing the scents of frankincense, myrrh and burnt rubber. Smashed windows from public places are gathered and reformed into glass panes.

Through acts of intervention, transformation and recontextualisation, she shifts its meaning without entirely erasing where it came from. Humour and seriousness sit alongside one another, as do violence and care, the absurd and the sacred.

Jayne McSwiney has exhibited internationally, from Sydney to the Netherlands, and her works have been shown in galleries such as Holmes a Court Gallery, May Space, Bureau Europa, Linden Gallery, and Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Her work has also extended beyond the conventional gallery space through performance, public intervention and site responsive projects.

She is the recipient of the Fiona Myer Award for Excellence and has been shortlisted for the Mandorla Art Award (2024), the Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship (2015), the Athenaeum Club Visual Arts Research Award and the Windsor Prize (2014). Her work was also shortlisted for safARI (2016). In 2014, she was awarded the Victorian College of the Arts Masters Scholarship.

McSwiney recently completed a three month artist residency at Kingston Arts Centre, Moorabbin, where she was awarded an artist studio. She was subsequently awarded a fully funded solo exhibition at the gallery. 

McSwiney holds a Master of Contemporary Art (First Class Honours, 2014) and a Graduate Certificate of Visual Art (First Class Honours, 2012) from the Victorian College of the Arts, and a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic and Product Design (Hons, 1998) from the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. She also studied for a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts, 1992.

Her work is held in private collections in Australia and the United States, and in the University of Ulster collection in Northern Ireland.