With a personal fascination for building, material and form, Olivia explores the illusionistic qualities of light, surface and space, which both modern architecture and modernist abstract painting share. She is particularly intrigued in creating sensory environments of reflective surfaces and minimalist neo-futuristic design, which can both disorientate the viewer’s perspective as well as distort the boundaries between medium-specificity and spatial limitations.
Through conflicting responses between control and playfulness, her works present juxtaposition between the virtual vs. actual, organic vs. artificial, abstract vs. representational and complexity vs. simplicity. Working with both found objects and painterly aesthetics, she displaces the ordinary with the profound, working with precision in computer-aided design and the hap-hazard in playful experimentation to manipulate the possibilities within her paintings and questioning the relationship between colour, paint and support.
Olivia utilises light as a medium to form small phenomenal curiosities that fuel further investigation, slowly unveiling mysteries of manipulated surfaces and intervenes with the architecture of the white cube space. Her work neither assigns a permanent location of meaning nor succumbs to any reduction of complexity, but are subjected to time, displacement and space.