Bio:

Olivia Walker is a visual artist and writer, born in New York City and raised predominantly in California. Her work portrays her experience with OCD, and her practice has aided her in finding solace. She has learned to embrace the positive qualities that stem from the diagnosis. In her writing; her narrative of scene and summary, her poetry, and complex literary pieces, she considers and addresses a multitude of struggles: obsessions, compulsions, triggers, and depersonalization/derealization that come with OCD. She strives to find the balance between the grotesque and beautiful and discomfort and solace. She investigates the dialogue and dichotomy between intimacy and opposition, structure and ruin, reality and unreality, and inner battles with order and chaos. She hopes her intricate, picturesque, vulnerable, metaphorical, and insightful writing can act as exposure and a tool for moving on, accepting, and escaping her past, as well as a platform to de-stigmatize mental illness.

About:

She has learned that it is crucial to consider both the manipulation of materials and the installation (use of space). She utilizes sculpture to create literal and metaphorical representations of subjects that her brain highlights. An example of this practice is a wax gummy bear casted in metal, and then placed on several tongues to represent the variation in semiotic value or experience. She also formed an installation that incorporates text and hand-made ceramic toilet paper rolls, placing emphasis on contamination compulsions. She attempts to fabricate an experience for viewers by recreating my obsessions, compulsions, and anxiety in a discernible way. Her work is inspired by the semiotic value of objects, triggers, and the relationship between trauma and perception.

The work she creates is a collage or combination of transmutation, construction, drawing, and text. She challenges herself to work with media such as clay, metal, paper, and found material to investigate the dialogue and dichotomy between intimacy and opposition, structure and ruin, reality and unreality, and order and chaos. While the conceptuality is personal, artists she studies inspire her to explore audience participation, space, and unusual materials such as soap, bodily fluids, and textiles. Through reading web articles, excerpts from biographies, and transcripts of interviews with artists such as Ana Mendieta, Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol, Helen Chadwick, Judy Chicago, and Janine Antoni, as well as traveling to various galleries and museums (such as The Tate, Lisson, and Saatchi), she accumulated an abundance of knowledge to strengthen and inform her artistic experimentation. She researched the nuanced overlap between interior and exterior lives. She wants to investigate the hidden aspects of individual reality and psychology.

As someone who enjoys traveling, she take advantages of visiting various cities around the world to stretch her artistic awareness. She wants to deepen her knowledge of conceptual and contextual practice, as well as experiment with material technique.

She intends to use her story, both with its failures and successes, to model a path to help others. She hopes her work (both visual and literary) can help herself and others.