Born 1977 in Eastern Cape, South Africa
Currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
Æiden Swan is a naturalist artist working at the place where myth and mysticism meet the physical world.
She was born in the Eastern Cape around the same time as the last dinosaur trundled off and was gifted with a very unusual upbringing which has seeped into her life and work against her better judgement.
With a diverse list of occupations throughout her career, her adventures include living on a yacht, working as a graphic designer in the late nineties, owning her own boulangerie, working in bird rescue and a owning a successful long running couture house until 2017 when “the call of the wild” finally became too strong and she returned to her artistic roots.
Æiden works predominantly with ink as a painter, performance artist and leatherworker as well as crafting jewelry. When she is not painting she creates artefacts for fictional worlds in the film industry.
In true form, she boasts an unusual collection of vintage science fiction novels, an encyclopedic knowledge of weird bird facts and a deep fascination with ancient history.
Her work explores humanity’s increasingly fragile connection to the natural world and its cycles, as well as our own ancestry, through a veil of dream imagery constructed in ink, charcoal, gold leaf and ochre tempera.
She creates many of the inks used in her work from wild botanical and earth pigments that she forages herself thus deepening the link between art and earth.
Image Credit: Ric Shields
