Quotes of the Day

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." Now zoom back to Swallow's teenage sketch book. The grimy pencil markings hardly indicate a future star student at the Victorian College of the Arts, but rather any fan of the bands INXS and Queen, whose postage stamp-sized faces are rendered here. But 11 years later, in a stroke of genius, Swallow returned to rub out the faces of the bands' now deceased front men, Michael Hutchence and Freddie Mercury, in Who Wants to Live Forever, 1989-2000. Therein lies Swallow's unique place in popular culture as both fan and eulogist - a hip-hop artist, if you like. The musical analogy seems apt: ever since his miniature turntable works spun into public consciousness in 1999, Swallow has made people look and listen. Often his works carry album titles, such as 2002's Private Dancer, and this jelutong piece has even curator Day sounding like a groupie: "The tire with a fish in it! I love that work!"

Swallow can stir passion in an often passionless art world. When Justin Paton first came across Swallow's sculpted ode to the '80s BMX bike, the author was "amazingly moved, despite its coolness and stillness," he recalls. "It's like he found a way to run a current of feeling back through that tradition of (readymade) sculpture." As with the metal detector, Peugeot Taipan, Commemorative Model (Discontinued Line), 1999, was copied from an original and spray-painted the color of snow, as if taking memories of these objects back to their virginity. Rendered in high fidelity is neither sound nor pure image but sensation. "You do feel that he's intensifying your senses somehow," says Paton. "Suddenly everything is sharpened and tingling, like the focus knob has been turned up on the world."

Or, sometimes, turned down to mute or slow. In late 2001, while taking part in a group show in Ghent, Belgium, Swallow was mesmerized by a carved wooden tondo by an 18th century artist in the local museum. With this painstaking craft, anathema in an age of instant gratification, he found a new medium. Swallow likes to call his wood carvings "folk Baroque," and his second attempt at carving, Venice's Come Together, 2002, is an ironic nod to Bernini's Tomb of Pope Alexander VII, the imperial canopy now a suburban beanbag. These days, a book on Bernini keeps vigil in Swallow's London studio. It's here the artist completed Killing Time after six months' solo work and three months with an assistant. "He usually works six days a week, 10 hours a day," reports Day. "A lot of time."

With skulls figuring so prominently (most wittily in his resin-molded versions of the iMac computer four years ago), one could be forgiven for thinking the artist morbid. Here Swallow pauses before smiling to reveal his chipped front tooth. "I don't want to come across as a grim anti-mortalist," he says. "I always thought art was a good measure of the time that it's in, but it should also be a way of thinking about just what you do with your life, what's come before you, and what's going to happen when you're not around." Zoom, then, to a century from now, and one wonders what audiences will make of Everything is Nothing, his 2003 self-portrait, in which his face is reduced to a skull, a chipped front tooth and an Adidas ski hat. Perhaps Swallow will outlast the brand.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Ricky Swallow's eerie replicas reveal the grace that hides in the commonplace