Erin Oliver
Find me on: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
Statement
My work investigates ideas about abstraction and artifice, cyclical processes, natural patterns, and permeable spatial membranes. Through an intuitive making process, I respond to the landscape and use abstraction to deconstruct natural imagery through drawing, cutting, layering, and suspending ephemeral materials in space. I then super-impose those shapes through light and digital projection, composing echoed forms through layers of shadows. The materials serve as objects as well as screens, distorting the sense of light and space, and notions of real, constructed, and imagined.
With the natural world as a point of departure, I am driven by ideas about what realities lay beyond our own, such as those imperceptible by human sensory organs or the limitations of time and physical space, or adaptations the future may hold. The artifice of natural and manmade environments are reflected in my material choices. For instance, plastic emulates natural surfaces like flesh, water, or ice, and is such a pervasive element that integrates the natural with the artificial. These dualities blur the line between real and imagined and echo distant futures where our bodies and our environment may well be composed of alternative substances resembling originals.
My multi-disciplinary process integrates phenomena of a place or landscape, often impacted by my physical location, but also bridges into a more universal experience. These works create passages for the viewer to find solace, inquiry, and wonder within a space open for their own encounters and interpretations. By combining sensory input from my surroundings with contextual knowledge and imagined realities, I traverse a sense of place theoretically and experientially in order to question and explore our experience of space, both its limitations and its possibilities.
Learn more:
CV
Find me on: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn
Statement
My work investigates ideas about abstraction and artifice, cyclical processes, natural patterns, and permeable spatial membranes. Through an intuitive making process, I respond to the landscape and use abstraction to deconstruct natural imagery through drawing, cutting, layering, and suspending ephemeral materials in space. I then super-impose those shapes through light and digital projection, composing echoed forms through layers of shadows. The materials serve as objects as well as screens, distorting the sense of light and space, and notions of real, constructed, and imagined.
With the natural world as a point of departure, I am driven by ideas about what realities lay beyond our own, such as those imperceptible by human sensory organs or the limitations of time and physical space, or adaptations the future may hold. The artifice of natural and manmade environments are reflected in my material choices. For instance, plastic emulates natural surfaces like flesh, water, or ice, and is such a pervasive element that integrates the natural with the artificial. These dualities blur the line between real and imagined and echo distant futures where our bodies and our environment may well be composed of alternative substances resembling originals.
My multi-disciplinary process integrates phenomena of a place or landscape, often impacted by my physical location, but also bridges into a more universal experience. These works create passages for the viewer to find solace, inquiry, and wonder within a space open for their own encounters and interpretations. By combining sensory input from my surroundings with contextual knowledge and imagined realities, I traverse a sense of place theoretically and experientially in order to question and explore our experience of space, both its limitations and its possibilities.
Learn more:
CV
