Still Life at High Speed

Was

there anything quite so stupid and time-wasting as the 1980s metal detector - the all but obsolete device that had gold diggers scouring beaches and suburban dumps for treasure? You can find yourself asking such questions with the work of Australian sculptor Ricky Swallow. And in the case of Diagonal Choir, 2000, his full-scale replica of a metal detector, made from PVC and epoxy and sprayed a ghostly white, you could ask: has anything as purposeful and beautifully crafted been shown in a gallery recently? Swallow, 29, is fascinated by the objects contemporary culture spits out. So when you find him eyeing off your seen-better-days Sony tape recorder, you get worried. "I have the same one," he says. "It's got the speed thing on it, too?"

Cassette-Corder TCM-453V could turn up in a Swallow show soon. If so, its speed control could prove useful. The pace with which Swallow has risen in the art world is staggering: in 1999, aged 25, he went from being on the dole to winning the $A100,000 Contempora 5 Art Prize in Melbourne, followed by a white-hot career based in Los Angeles and now London. That rapidity contrasts with the stillness of his work. With his best-known piece, the head of Darth Vader made from layers of charcoal MDF board (Model for a Sunken Monument, 1999), there's a sense that time is warping before your very eyes.

Now zoom into the future. We are at the 2005 Venice Biennale, perhaps in the midst of another heatwave, and fan-toting crowds are looking for some air-conditioned art to soothe their nerves. It's hard to think of a cooler prospect than Ricky Swallow in the Australian pavilion, which will open to the public in mid June. Curator Charlotte Day envisages "a contemplative, slower experience that takes time to look at and engage with," and Swallow is already hard at work on two new pieces - including a Medusa-inspired bike helmet filled with writhing snakes - to join his L.A.-completed cactus and skull-in-a-beanbag works. But the centerpiece will be Killing Time, 2003-2004, a still-life table overflowing with the sea creatures of Swallow's Australian childhood in the Victorian fishing town of San Remo. Like the other Venice works, it is carved from the light, blond wood of the rubber tree, jelutong. Any paler and it would disappear into the walls. Up close, the forensic detail - a lobster springs up with the alacrity of an ocean wave, the rind of a lemon dangles spellbound over the table's edge - can send shivers up spines.

It's a masterwork from one of contemporary art's most arresting time travelers. In a zippy new monograph on the artist to be published next week (Thames & Hudson; 112 pages), Justin Paton likens Swallow to a hobby-shop Proust. "There's a sense in which Ricky's career looks less and less like a linear progression from one object to the next," says the curator of contemporary art at New Zealand's Dunedin Public Art Gallery. "It's much more like some circle of time, because he's always monkeying with chronology in interesting ways."