Savannah Jarvis: The sword doesn't drop. : N.Smith Gallery

In the ancient story of the Sword of Damocles, a single blade hangs by a hair above the head of a man who has been granted a taste of power. The sword becomes a metaphor for privilege under constant threat — the anxious awareness that with one’s position can change at any moment. 

In The Sword Doesn’t Drop, Savannah Jarvis’ debut exhibition with N.Smith Gallery, this metaphor is recast. Here, the suspended swords sit not as symbols of political danger but as an awareness and an a intimate fear; that of the body. Re-contextualising the swords within the world of chronic pain; they are sharp, looming, hanging over your head. 

The exhibition brings together fourteen oil paintings and a field of cast-cement swords suspended in space. Each work stages a confrontation with these metaphoric maxims. The paintings draw on common, often fearful, self-descriptions of chronic pain — phrases that usually remain private and internal — and fix them into visibility. No longer imagined or weightless, the bodily fears are here in the room, present enough to walk among.

Jarvis’s paintings move between figuration and suggestion, worked with gradients, abrupt edges, and satin expanses that slow the eye. Blades appear in impossible contexts: held aloft in quiet atmospheres or dissolving into ambiguous terrains. The images ask for a double reading — first, the instinctive recognition of danger; second, the knowledge that this danger is constructed, shaped by learned narratives around pain and permanence. At this juncture lies the work’s reparative intent.

Underlying the project is a belief that visual culture plays an active role in shaping how pain is understood. The images we inherit, from medical diagrams to popular media, inform the metaphors we reach for, which in turn influence the neural scripts the brain rehearses. These scripts can shape not only the lived experience of pain but also society’s response to it. Painting has long been part of this cultural scaffolding: not simply recording what is seen but offering frameworks for interpretation. In this project, painting is deployed not to reinforce the regime of pain-as-catastrophe but to interrupt it, creating a record in which the feared object remains, but does not act.

Visually, the exhibition resists the acute-trauma aesthetic often seen in depictions of pain, which can reinforce catastrophic thinking. Instead, it settles into stillness and suspension. These swords do not drip with blood nor swing mid-strike; they are caught in a state of deferral. The threat has been measured, cast, hung — and will go no further unless we imagine it.  With chronic pain discourse, metaphors matter. They are not decorative but integral to how the brain organises and sustains experience. 

In this way, The Sword Doesn’t Drop sits between art and clinical theatre. It invites rehearsal for a different relationship with pain — one in which metaphors are externalised, suspended, and questioned. The works neither deny the weight of chronic pain nor reduce it to symbol. Instead, they acknowledge its reality while disrupting the imagery that entrenches it. If visual culture helps define what pain ‘is' in the public imagination, art can also help unmake that definition. The result is an exhibition that works both as catalogue and as reframing device, mapping the metaphors of pain, while dismantling their power. It asks: What changes when the threat is fixed in place, visible but inert? When the weight that hangs above you is given form — and when you are assured, at last, that the sword doesn’t drop?