Olivia Robinson (b. 1994)
Olivia Robinson is an abstract painter and sculptor interested in the forces and cycles that lovingly shape life while remaining completely indifferent to human desires. Her work employs ecological relationships and references water, mold, reproduction, and the cosmos.
Robinson grew up in the dense rainforest of Vancouver Island. There, she quickly learned that water was home, but also a headache—an essential yet relentless force. She chases that feeling of home by working with water as a collaborator to stain the textured grounds of her paintings.
Now living on Vancouver’s North Shore, Robinson often finds inspiration for her real and imagined fungal forms when looking underneath decaying logs by the stream near her home. She also draws upon her experience with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome for references to the abject and human bodily cycles.
Through her richly coloured atmospheric abstractions, Robinson asks what it means to coexist with ecological cycles that exceed human control.