Ricky Swallow is one of Australia's most renowned artists. As a sculptor he represented Australia at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and many of his carved wooden works are currently the subject of a survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. However, works on paper have always been a part of Swallow's art practice, and a new exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery brings together a broad range of these playful and atmospheric works.

The main actors in Ricky Swallow's early watercolours are intelligent and faintly menacing monkeys. They read books, operate laptops, listen through headphones, pilot spaceships towards other worlds, and generally run the show. Swallow records their actions and antics with all the enthusiasm of a field researcher with notebook flipped open: here they are reading books; there they are fondling guns. It's zoology shaded by comedy, a kind of diary of evolutionary downfall.

However, like William Hogarth's many eighteenth-century paintings and engravings featuring preening and puffed-up monkeys, Swallow's watercolours of this type are not about monkeys at all, but rather us humans. They are about our flailing and preposterous attempts to make progress, get ahead, extend ourselves in space and time. Whether they are tinkering with gadgets, steering spacecraft, spraying graffiti on walls or creating fresh versions of themselves in the lab, Swallow's monkeys might all be considered surrogate artists, using whatever is at their disposal to reach beyond themselves. The resulting watercolours are science fictions of a comic and wistful kind, gently dwelling on the absurdity of our efforts to make ourselves known in a limitless universe.

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