Olivia Bax

There is a human relationship with Bax’s works. She is, again, another artist I am looking to that does not overtly discuss the body. It ‘orbits coordinated by techniques of the body, such as sitting, reaching, leaning, kicking, holding, resting and pulling.’ (Wood, J. 2022) I love this idea of orbiting techniques of the body – it is at once human and not human, just like Bax’s sculptures. ‘My work is not figurative per se, but I want the work to relate to humans and our world and to suggest use, function, purpose and feeling. The work relates to my own body through the physicality of the construction. I am happy jostling in-between figuration and abstraction’ (Cross Lane Projects, 2022). This notion of jostling continues and is imbed into the very fabrication of her works – a jostling into life ‘when the linear turns into a solid.’ A jostling of ‘embodied state changes’ of expectations and realisations in the materiality when she works with pulps which goes from a liquid to a solid. A jostling of insides and outsides ‘like our front and our innards.’ And the jostling of colours, emotions, moods and characters that it gives to the works (Cross Lane Projects, 2022).

Upon reading into Olivia Bax’s practice I think I have realised that there are so many more links between her works and mine. At the outset of just looking at her work I was not convinced, initially, I saw them as lumpy, uncomfortable structures, lurid in colour and mishmash in form. Visually I struggled to find links that I liked. But I think it is actually in the things that I didn’t like, or in the differences that there is the most to be learnt for me. Bax’s works stake their territory with far more confidence than mine, their awkward yet tentative ability to stand are matters of feat that they proudly display. Her use of colour, like an unconventional way of painting, is saturated both literally into the pulp in the making process and its overall hue. They have a callousness to them in the way internal organs do but Bax has found such a poignant way of interweaving their juxtapositions that they become compelling in a way that is hard to ignore. 

My initial and immediate influence from her work was a small number of monoprints she displayed in the archive of her website, this gave me the confidence to show my monoprints – that initially I thought were too messy to count as works that could be proudly seen. What I want to take on going forward is her bold and brave navigation of scale and making processes. I keep teetering on the edge of scaling up and if anyone is going to help guide a way in which I can translate this into my own making, I think it is the work of Olivia Bax.