Rebecca Swann's works in small metals deploy a vocabulary of forms derived from nature and from cultural references. The syntax of materials includes those traditionally employed in jewelry: silver, pearls and other stones, as well as bamboo, and also materials more recently introduced-titanium. The systemic semiosis 1 of Swann's works—their style with the term understood as their mode of being—is that of refinement and restraint of form punctuated by exuberance. The pieces are physically small, befitting their use function, but are experienced as expansively large and sculptural. Rather than as miniatures, one perceives the works as of an "intimate immensity." 2

Swann's pieces are frontally oriented, referencing their placement on the body and its clothing on which they are to be worn and viewed. The reference of bodily placement imposes the categorical conventions of a vestimentary code 3 on the pieces, conventions which equiprimordially entail and negate constraints of form.

While works such as A Wealth of Trees Brooch and House Over Water Brooch assert their reference to nature through their material cause—i.e., the bamboo used in the piece—all of the other works also employ natural materials: silver, copper, titanium, pearls and stones are no less natural materials than bamboo, but materials refined and transformed to fit them to use in the works. While the bamboo is no less selected and prepared for use, it retains more of its underlying sense of naturalness than the other materials.

Swann's works referencing antecedent cultural forms, such as Celtic Remnant Neckpiece and Geisha Necklace, are overt in their reference, which is predicated on formal analogy no less than on the specification provided by the title. 4 A broader level of reference to antecedent cultural forms obtains synchronically at the level of the syntax of material and formal constraints and possibilities constituting the medium as such. Projected diachronically, this broad level of reference constitutes the basis of a history of practices, a tradition within which the works are situated.

One has come to expect, in the last forty or fifty years of practices in the visual arts, that the materials employed in sculpture or painting, ceramics or printmaking, and even the categories of these and other media, will be put into question. More saliently, the noion of 'medium' as a singularity has been increasingly put into question. This move from the reductivist essentialism of modernist practice within the specificity of a given medium to a position of an uncentered medium is approximately the move from high modernism to late modernism. 5

1. The term is from Donald Kuspit, The Dialectic of Decadence (New York: Stux Press, 1993), 40.
2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 183f.
3. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward, Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux / Hill and Wang, 1983).
4. See Hazard Adams, "Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," J. Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46:1 (Fall 1987), 7-21.
5. See Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage On the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).