In the 360° installation Swell, hundreds of portraits spanning the history of photography have been cropped of their original contexts
and mounted upside down on a cylindrical projector. They are inverted and legibly focused by lenses that orbit
the cylindrical projectors body, casting moving trajectories of small groups or vignettes that are perpetually revisited,
looping repetitively around the space. As the scanning lenses orbit and progress across the transperancy's surface, they reveal
populations of individuals who's facial expressions subtly shift through open mouthed gazes, then frowns, smirks, toothy grins and
back to gazes, literally undoing the (original) portraits' establishment of social context and by extension social order and its suggested hierarchies.
In this way, Swell attempts to equalize the playing field.
For example, through analogous countenances (left leaning smirks), a young girl (circa 1930) and a CEO (circa 1984), cross temporal and social
boundaries to become unlikely comrades.
Rather than these individuals being easily examined by the viewer, the sea of faces in this population are made only fleetingly available to the
viewer, thwarting the centuries old custom of encouraging the gaze and its reductive indexing or feigned 'knowing' of the subject.
In addition to designing and building the bespoke projector herself, Fiona made custom lenses by sandwiching pairs of glass lenses of various sizes,
creating infinite focus, allowing the work to be installed in any sized space without having to adjust the focus on the projector.

Technology at the time of making Swell Today we take our computational power for granted. It's interesting to consider the working environment of early media-based artists. For Swell,
I documented the many portraits, shooting them with my film camera and then having the negatives digitized to a CD.
In 1995 I had a newish PowerMac Desktop computer whose hard drive was a whopping (haha) 2 gigabytes. Needless to say, trying to assemble
the portraits into a panorama that could be printed on a singular piece of paper of film (to be mounted on my projector) was impossible with
only 2 gigabyte hard drive (I can't recall the speed of the processor, but needless to say, any task took inordinate amounts of time.
To assemble the portraits into a single panorama, I was luckily able to use the Belkin Gallery's computer that boasted a whopping 6 gigabyte hard drive.
We crashed it constantly while assembling the images. Once finished, we downloaded it onto a 100mb zip drive and off to the lab it went to be printed
on a single piece of transparent film. Because of the heat generated by the bulbs, even given the fan I installed, I also seated heat shield between
the projector body and the transparency. see essay Swell by Carol Sawyer, 1996 Grunt Gallery Monograph.