Olivia Bernard
Through form, shape, color and translucency, my work makes reference to personal events, nature, and larger world events. My life has always been centered in the physical world, that of the body, nature, and physical exertion through outdoor activities and building things. In the studio, my inquiry through materials currently combines skeletal elements with delicate materials -- paper, wire, wax, mylar --to examine the most ephemeral aspects of life: skin, wings, lungs, clouds, water, breath, air.
As pieces begin to form, I make associations to the world outside the studio, and to my life part time on a pond and part time in the city, all of which become my subject matter and content. I intend my forms to contain toughness and resilience, but also be inherently fragile and impermanent, as is evident in my choice of materials and how I work them. I want a tension to operate in the work, between pieces barely becoming something, and their seeming to tell a story. In general, I resist the artifice of narrative.
In my current sculptural pieces, I am depending on the natural color of the materials used, to create my palette. I am also extending my examination of the notion of fragility by, in some case, taking it to an edge of close to disintegration. In the drawings, I am beginning two new series, in which I am attempting to go more deeply into aspects of my visual vocabulary that I have used for years. I do this in order to deepen these elements, extend them, understand more about them. And finally in several of the pieces, I am asking: how simple can a piece be and still speak, perhaps powerfully?
I hope that my work will bridge the worlds of sensuality, pleasure, and beauty as well as those of chaos, violence and the macabre.
