Submerged Motherlands

Swoon created Submerged Motherland, a monumental site-specific installation for the Brooklyn Museum, transforming the gallery into a fantastic landscape.

The installation centers on a monumental sculptural tree, which will rise into the 22-meter-high dome, with a constructed environment at its base.

This constructed environment features Swoon’s signature figurative prints and drawings, and cut-paper foliage. Also included are the rafts that Swoon created and sailed on the Grand Canal uninvited during the 2009 Venice Biennale. In this performance project, Swimming Cities of Serenissima, Swoon and a crew of thirty sailed from Slovenia to Venice on rafts made primarily of New York City garbage, collecting scrapped material in Slovenia, and artifacts and curiosities along their journey.

Known for her intricately-cut printed portraits situated on walls and abandoned buildings and, more recently, for her large-scale figurative installations, Swoon celebrates everyday people, while also exploring social and environmental issues. Often inspired by both historical and contemporary events, Swoon engages with climate change for this installation, particularly the catastrophic Hurricane Sandy that hit New York in 2012, and also Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain with Europe that was destroyed by a tsunami nearly 8,000 years ago. These places and events separated by thousands of years and miles form a salient image to draw upon and to explore the numerous and complex results of climate change.