Jet Swan, Material, 2021

A striking new photographic voice engages with street portraiture to create dark, interior psychological spaces exploring the relationship between public and private lives. British artist Jet Swan’s first monograph collects together the last three years of the artist’s engagement with members of the public through impromptu studio spaces, such as an empty shopfront inside a commercial mall in Scarborough, northeast England, and a repurposed community hall in Ramsgate, Kent, where the artist lives and works. Swan balances the public identities nurtured and maintained by those who pass through her studio against darker, intimate photographic spaces, contrasting private and tactile images of the body with photographs that skirt around the margins of conventional staged portraiture. With a new text in response by acclaimed poet Rachael Allen.