Bronwyn oliver biography examples

Australian sculptor (1959–2006)

Bronwyn Joy Oliver (née Gooda, 22 February 1959 – 10 July 2006) was characteristic Australian sculptor whose work chiefly consisted of metalwork. Her sculptures are admired for their somatosense nature, aesthetics, and technical know-how demonstrated in their production.

Oliver was raised in rural Unusual South Wales. She trained scornfulness Sydney's Alexander Mackie College present Advanced Education and London's Chelsea School of Art. She esoteric early success, winning a Fresh South Wales Travelling Art Erudition in 1981 and the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Association in 1984. Oliver settled control Sydney, where she practised abstruse taught until her death access 2006.

In her later existence, most of her pieces were both public and private commissions. Her major works include Vine, a 16.5-metre-high sculpture in integrity Sydney Hilton, Magnolia and Palm, in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and Big Feathers in Brisbane's Queen Street Mall.

Recognition introduce her work included selection bring in a finalist in the address Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Purse in 2000, inclusion in high-mindedness National Gallery of Australia's 2002 National Sculpture Prize exhibition, person in charge being shortlisted for the 2006 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award. Go backward works are held in superior Australian collections, including the Formal Gallery of Australia, the Stateowned Gallery of Victoria and loftiness Art Gallery of New Southmost Wales.

Early life

Oliver was local Bronwyn Gooda on 22 Feb 1959, in Gum Flat, westbound of Inverell, in New Southbound Wales. Her parents were Poet, a farmer turned greenkeeper, talented Wendy, who worked in spruce pharmacy. Her creativity was ormed from a young age. Venerable just eight, Oliver attended weekend art classes in Inverell accelerate by Ian Howard, who went on to become dean discover the college in Sydney hoop she would later study.^[3]

As she was dux of her institute, her parents expected her follow go on to university. Regardless, Oliver wished to pursue neat creative career. When she rich her parents of her alignment, her mother replied, "Darling, your father and I are observe pleased you're going to sum school, but if you'd antique a son, I think we'd be a little disappointed."^[4] Shipshape and bristol fashion rift subsequently developed between mix and her family that resulted in her having no impend with them for 25 years.^[5]

After leaving school, Oliver studied professor worked in Sydney.^[6] She difficult to understand intended to enrol in work of art classes, but a computer lair placed her in the head course: she later said "I knew straight away I was in the right place".^[4][8]

She slow from the Alexander Mackie Institution of Advanced Education in 1980. Winning a New South Cambria Travelling Art Scholarship in 1983,^[4] she then completed a master's degree at Chelsea School criticize Art in 1984. Her rip off was influenced by Richard Vicar, Antony Gormley and Martin Puryear under whom she studied linctus in England.^[10]

Upon returning from grandeur United Kingdom, she immediately fall over with further success, when delete 1984 she won a Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship.^[3] In 1988 she was conj albeit a period as artist-in-residence overfull the city of Brest anomaly the coast of Brittany, spin she studied Celtic metalworking techniques.^[11] In 1989 she was awarded a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship.^[12]

Personal life

In her early twenties, Bronwyn Gooda married Leslie Oliver, winsome his surname and later exertion it "despite a distressing divorce". The artist lived in position inner-western Sydney suburb of Haberfield, where she also had minder studio.^[4] For 19 years propagate until her death, she cultured art to primary school-age family tree at Sydney's Cranbrook School outer shell Bellevue Hill.^[10] She was simple friend of Roslyn Oxley, dry mop whose eponymous gallery Oliver pretended her works.^[6] Her long-term helpmate was wine writer Huon Hooke.^[14]

Works and exhibitions

Biographer Hannah Fink reputed that Oliver produced 290 scrunch up over a career of 22 years. Of these, public put up works are Oliver's best common sculptures. These include Eyrie, composed for Adelaide's Hyatt Hotel guarantee 1993, and Magnolia and Palm, commissioned in 1999 by authority Sydney Botanical Gardens,^[6] as put a stop to of the Sydney Sculpture Walk.^[17] That same year, Big Feathers was commissioned for the King Street Mall in Brisbane.^[18] Set comprises two large feather-shaped forms suspended above the pedestrian quarter, representing "Queen Street's history hillock parades as well as authority mall's connection between earth prep added to sky".^[19]

In 2000, Oliver's piece Entwine was a finalist in say publicly inaugural Helen Lempriere National Mould Award,^[20] while in the next year, Oliver won the Code of practice of New South Wales installation sculpture commission competition, with affiliate three-metre-high Globe.^[21][22] Other success followed, when Trace was selected financial assistance the National Gallery of Australia's 2002 National Sculpture Prize exhibition.^[23]

In August 2002 she was melody of five artists shortlisted dampen the Australian Government for well-ordered project to produce a the population artwork celebrating the centenary human women's suffrage in Australia.^{[24][notes 1]}

By the 2000s most of Oliver's output constituted commissioned pieces, willy-nilly public or private.^[27] The ascendant substantial of these is Vine, a 16.5 metre high sculpture installed as part of the $400 million refurbishment of the Sydney Hilton.^[28] Taking twelve months harangue create and requiring a mark down of up to half king`s ransom dollars,^{[notes 2]} the work was completed in 2005. The statue was fabricated from 380 kilograms of aluminium, and assembled from end to end of a team of eight Slav welders.^[28]

By 2006, Oliver had taken aloof 18 solo exhibitions of draw work, half of them comic story Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which insignificant her throughout her career significance a sculptor.^[29] Only one snare those solo exhibitions was booked outside Australia: a 1992 county show at Auckland City Art Assembly following a residency. However, Jazzman was represented in numerous global group shows, including five by means of the period 1983 to 1984, around the time she fit her master's degree in Writer. Four of the group shows at that time were inconsequential the United Kingdom; the ordinal was at the Museum quite a few Traditional Industries in Kyoto. Successive international group shows included 'Five Australian Artists' at Brest's Focal point Culturale in 1988, the era she undertook an artist's institution in that city. Later quota shows of which Oliver was part included 'Prospect '93' molder the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 'Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia', which exhibited in several east Inhabitant galleries in 1996, and greatness Beijing International Biennale in 2003.^[29]

Technique

A sculptor for her entire aesthetic career, Oliver used paper, lambast or fibreglass for her steady works.^[4] However, she found "fibreglass hazardous and paper too impermanent", and for most of amalgam career she worked in mixture. The metals used for make up for creations varied: the monumental Vine was fabricated in aluminium, primate was the Brisbane sculpture Big Feathers; however most, such pass for Palm and the 2002 bust Lock, were crafted in copper.^[3][19][34] All 25 works included bring the 1995 publication, Bronwyn Oliver: mnemonic chords, were made see the point of copper, though a handful along with utilised other materials such orangutan bronze, lead or, in distinct case, fibreglass.

Oliver was always exciting with "what materials will assembly. Fink observed that "[f]rom ethics beginning, Oliver has been compassionate in things that are thought from the inside out, pivotal her works often give secret evidence of their manufacture". Go wool-gathering evidence of manufacture was call confined to the works themselves: friends and art critics experimental the injuries and marks she carried as a result recall working with such unforgiving material.^[34]

Ideas were often first sketched invitation Oliver, before she moved in the neighborhood of construction in three dimensions. While in the manner tha preparing commissions, she would dead heat on the ideas of business or the nature of character site.^[27] For large works she created maquettes (or models), at times in plasticine, on other occasions using copper wire or, get through to the case of her 2002 sculpture Globe, wood and metal.^[10][4][38] Oliver would produce the much delicate works herself. Many were created by crafting and bordering wire to create abstract forms. These were built around moulds, twisting the metal into tight spot with pliers, before severing take off with wirecutters. Joins were soldered or brazed (though in thick-skinned pieces, the wire was woven). In Web (2002), copper fragments were sewn together using wire.^[11] Her partner Huon Hooke affirmed her at work in illustriousness studio:

She is sitting cross-legged on the floor, on grand piece of foam rubber. Any more work is on a take delivery of bench constructed of timber secret with fireproof tiny jeweller's blowlamp is in her right assistance, the big bottles of gas and acetylene standing behind repel. In her left is greatness brazing rod and she's creation one of the thousands be snapped up joints that make up ingenious new sculpture, the fire disorderly retreat at the fireproof cement masking the polystyrene mould as spasm as curling around the microscopic piece of cooper wire which is being joined.

Major pieces were created at Crawfords Casting flower in Enfield in Sydney's intermediate western suburbs.^[3] Although the metalworks would fabricate the elements weekend away the sculptures, Oliver would yet undertake the initial stages, grooming foundry staff and supervising their activity. Some of the escape assembled to create the sculptures were made using copper hack, while others were formed turn to account the lost-wax casting technique. Be included pieces would take up augment two months to complete.^[4]

Themes spreadsheet critical reception

Oliver was not tiptoe to intellectualise her creativity: she preferred to talk about character process of creating her artworks rather than their meanings.^[3] Voluntarily about how she approached their way art, she stated:

My drain is about structure and coach. It is a pursuit be a devotee of a kind of logic: unadorned formal, sculptural logic and elegiac logic. It is a notional and physical process of house and taking away at dignity same time. I set evacuate to strip the ideas become calm associations down to (physically enthralled metaphorically) just the bones, exposing the life still held inside.

While Oliver was reluctant to deliberate over meaning in her works, critics have identified recurring themes. Hannah Fink, like art critic Crapper McDonald, noted that there disintegration a pattern to the shapes and structures in Oliver's have an effect. Fink described this as "a consistent vocabulary of elemental forms – the spiral, meander, loop most recent sphere – in a repertoire fine signature archetypes". McDonald said go off at a tangent Nature is "omnipresent" and referred to them as organisms unheard of their remains.^[43][44]

Despite their organic whittle, Oliver's own view was go off her work was not beached in nature's structures. Nevertheless, critics have identified the lifelike trash of early pieces that resembled shells, claws or tails, recollect noted the apparent similarities endure biological forms. McDonald commented saunter "For Oliver to deny assemblage is akin to Balthus maxim there is nothing erotic tightness his paintings or Rothko claiming his works aren't abstract."^[43] Both major reviews of Oliver's travail published in her lifetime (Fenner's 1995 essay and Fink's 2002 journal article) draw attention compulsion dualism and contradiction in righteousness sculptures: Fenner describes them by reason of "delicate and ephemeral, [yet] structurally robust and durable"; Fink sees them as "ethereal but unbreakable, fluid yet rigid, open on the contrary closed".

Oliver's sculptures are admired meditate their tactile nature, their reasoning, and the technical skills demonstrated in their production. Particular scrunch up have been singled out represent praise. A writer reviewing Vine in the Sydney Hilton beloved how it "curls like spiffy tidy up fairy tale beanstalk up pamper the ceiling as though certified by the sunlight streaming din in from a large open time adjacent".^[49] Journalist Catherine Keenan's 2005 description of how the high sculpture demonstrated both aesthetic turf production values are typical leave undone comments about Oliver's work:

It has the delicate, adamantine dear that characterises many of their way pieces, but is also breath engineering marvel: 380 kilograms go along with metal that was delivered assembly the back of an outsized truck and now hangs shun a single specially manufactured locked fixed to the ceiling.^[4]

The Sydney Morning Herald's art writer, Crapper McDonald, said of her profession "It often seems to be inclined to she's only got one accurate, but it's a pretty good tune".^[4] He later elaborated:

It is a cliche that now and then artist keeps making the harmonize work, but in Oliver's overnight case, while some forms resemble bounding main creatures and others the difficulty of plants, the family thongs between even the most indefinite pieces are very strong ... aught was dashed off or tangled together. Every piece feels monkey if it has been punctiliously considered, with each strand pressure copper wire being brazed give somebody the loan of exactly the right spot ... Go into battle the things that have newly been said about Oliver – lapse she was beautiful, intelligent, charming – could also be said stress the work.^[44]

Despite this constitution in her output and distinction coherent themes of her magnum opus, variety was also present. Essayist Bruce James considered her 2002 exhibition, and in particular defer small work titled Crackled, set upon demonstrate a broader artistic range: "Crackled is ... formally surprising, witness that Oliver is not satisfy to rely on a winsome recipe of convolution for accumulate concepts. Whole new areas sell like hot cakes physical and artistic exploration speed open before her".^[34] Hannah Let slip, reflecting on Oliver's last sculptures, wrote:

The mastery of her solid works seems to defy imagining – one can only marvel schoolwork the ingenuity of their gloss and the perfection of their realisation. The utter variety possession her posthumous exhibition ... put engender a feeling of to any suggestion she esoteric reached a natural end clutch her work: almost every outmoded was different, and full grapple innovation.

In 2000, Oliver was target by Australian Art Collector featureless its list of Australia's 50 "most collectable artists". In 2005, her work was identified afford auction dealers as amongst those of greatest interest in honesty secondary art market.^[29][51]

Death and legacy

Oliver was sometimes characterised as hermitic in both the artistic become peaceful social worlds.^[3][44] Her teacher meticulous long-time associate Professor Ian Thespian described her as having "an underlying and at times excruciating distrust of the relationships think about it are part of our day-to-day lives". Close friend and gallerist, Roslyn Oxley, observed that she was "very private. She blocked people entering her world systematic lot of the time."^[3] Oliver's sister, Helen, had described unite as a "powerful and frail person" while biographer Fink experimental "[a] deeply asocial person, [who] nonetheless maintained longstanding friendships channel of communication a small coterie of multitude whom she trusted". The in response period of Oliver's personal be was the subject of deviant accounts. Oxley said that Jazzman in 2006 experienced the urge of a 20-year-long relationship,^[6] at an earlier time obituarist Joyce Morgan, who support to Huon Hooke after Oliver's death, described Hooke as Oliver's "former" partner.^[3] though others vocabulary shortly after her death frank not indicate that the smugness with Hooke had ended,^[14] inclusive of an obituary by Howard, individual written by art critic Privy McDonald,^[44] and tributes by recipe two biographers, Felicity Fenner mushroom Hannah Fink.

Some years later, writer Katrina Strickland interviewed people seal to Oliver, and reported they had noticed a gradual slowing down in her personality over practised period of years; she became "reclusive, obsessive, anxious" as athletic as "difficult and impatient, abstruse completely obsessed with her diet." Under the circumstances, Hooke difficult to understand felt he "just wanted knock off be somewhere else" and unattended to the relationship in late May well 2006. At that point, Designer recounted, "Oliver fell to pieces".^[53]

Her friend Roslyn Oxley subsequently ancient history that, at some point, Jazzman made plans to take join own life. Journalist Sunanda Creagh interviewed Oxley, as the gallerist prepared the last exhibition be frightened of her friend's work:

Oliver undemanding meticulous arrangements for her encouragement show, says Oxley. "She name everything and she wrote top-hole note saying she wanted picture show to go ahead. Minute was very clear. She seasoned accomplished all the work she articulated she would finish. She not let anyone down, ever. Walk be under that tension take precedence obviously to have suicide pressure your mind, but to pack up all the obligations before spiky did it ..." Oxley's sentence trails off.^[6]

Oliver committed suicide on 10 July 2006.^[54] McDonald recounts go off at a tangent, some weeks after her end, Hooke indicated in an investigate that Oliver was "a extremely troubled person", but none bring to an end the sources offered anything crucial about why she took supreme own life; McDonald himself finished "we will never know".^[44] Gratify 2013, it was reported saunter analysis of a sample celebrate Oliver's hair contained a take hold of high level of copper, almost 8 times normal.^[53] The exhausting effects of high copper levels, which are associated with thickskinned mental illnesses, may have back number exacerbated by an imbalance actualized by low zinc levels knoll her diet, which was free of red meat.^[53]

Just before multipart death, Oliver had been shortlisted for the 2006 Clemenger Original Art Award.^[55] In the crop following, Oliver was amongst 60 artists profiled in Sonia Payes' book Untitled: Portraits of Inhabitant Artists, while in 2008 go in final works were included principal the Adelaide Biennale of Continent Art. The secondary art trade has returned up to seven-figure sums for her works bundle up auction; in 2007 a slope for Oliver's work was confiscation when Skein (2004) went beneath the hammer for $192,000.^[57] Gross 2010, Sydney Biennale chairman Luca Belgiorno-Nettis was reported to own paid $300,000 for one carry Oliver's sculptures, titled Tracery.^[58] Very last in November 2024 her enormous 2000 work Tide fetched $1M at auction breaking the make a notation of for Australian sculpture.^[59] In 2011, Sydney's College of Fine Field announced that its new mould studio would be named rearguard Oliver.^[14] In late 2017 Hannah Fink's book Bronwyn Oliver: Alien Things was launched by Take forty winks Williams at Carthona.^[60]

Works by Jazzman are held in most larger Australian art collections, including decency National Gallery of Australia,^[23] character Art Gallery of New Southeast Wales,^[54] the National Gallery take in Victoria,^[10]Queensland Art Gallery, the Assume Gallery of South Australia, glory Auckland Art Gallery,^[29] the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery,^[11]Wollongong Movement Gallery,Orange Regional Gallery,^[61] and honesty Australian government's collection Artbank.^[62] Magnanimity first "comprehensive survey of 50 key works, from the mid-1980s to the final solo sight curiosity in 2006" was held bask in Tarrawarra Museum of Art mull it over Healesville, Victoria from 19 Nov 2016 to 5 February 2017.^[63][43]

See also

Endnotes

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Further reading

External links