Olivia Mansfield
Degree: BA (hons) Fine Art
University: Goldsmiths UOL
Graduation Year: 2012
New Blood Art Commentary
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Olivia Mansfield’s small paintings pack a punch. Her intuitive process manifests energies drawn from the substratum and celestial alike. Take ‘Meet Me By the Dunes’. The contours of the landscape, earthy tones, hazy or solid application of watercolour, the feeling of looking simultaneously at the recesses of the future and the distant past – all this gives the work its mythic flavour. The blissful use of paint meets the sensuality of a landscape or the human figure in Mansfield’s work. In ‘Surya’ the circular canvas, with its scene of converging temporalities, is the setting for a nude both classical and iconographic, arising from its sublime surroundings. In ‘Focus on Deep Waters’, the quality of paint conveys the quality of water in its motion through blurred and focused perspectives; in ‘Your Plinth Is On Fire’ it is amorphous and undulating. In ‘Tread Lightly’ we begin to understand the intuitive process in this case as one which taps into form rhythmically, through the use of colour and shape. Vivid, vital: though small in scale, these are by no means diminutive visions. The richness, the eternal about these paintings is provoked by a submersion in the rhythm of decay and renewal.
Artist Statement
My work looks to highlight a discourse between landscape, the wilderness, sublime nature and how we as human beings fit, mould, morph, move and adapt within it.
As I work I focus on intuition, on basic form and shape, allowing the fluidity of of the paint, the natural organic marks made by pushing and pulling within the viscose medium to lead me to an outcome. I see figures manifested, swirling and floating through rays of light and dark, caressing, almost bleeding into the landscapes around them with loose flowing motions.
Places emerge and rare beings exist through doorways and portals to strange yet familiar lands. These territories celebrate luminosity and boldness of colour; they have a relationship deeply rooted within chaos, creation and destruction and they engage with forces of elemental power and sacredness of space.
Solo Exhibitions
(2021) Rosa Oculus, The Little Bread Peddler, Pimlico, London
(2017) In Sediment, Upstairs at the Ritzy Gallery, Brixton, South London
Group Exhibitions
(2024) Eternal Elements, Complex 156, Zurich
(2024) Beyond the Folk, The Artists Workspace Gallery, The Crypt Gallery, London
(2023) The Flesh and the Answer, Art on a Postcard, The Bomb Factory, Covent Garden, London
(2023) Luminosity, Gallery Live, Stony Stratford, Milton Keynes
(2023) Small and Mighty, Ladies Drawing Club, Online
(2023) Queer Frontiers, 'Queer Myths Queer Futures', Artiq, 1-4 Walkers Court, Soho, London
(2022) Relationship with the Self, Take courage gallery, curated by Juliet Wilson, New cross, London
(2022) Winter Auction 2022, Art on a Postcard, The Bomb Factory
(2022) A Room of Her Own, Irving Contemporary, Oxford
(2022) Spirit Within, Brushes with Greatness, Ben Oakley Gallery, Greenwich, London
(2022) Visions of Healing, Brushes with Greatness, 44 Hallam street conference centre, London
(2022) Women Celebrating Surrealism, Islington Arts Factory, 2 Parkhurst rd, N7 0SF London
(2021) Euphoric, Procrastinating, Josephine-May Bailey, online
(2021) With Love, II, Paint Talk (@Paint_talk), online
(2021) Into The Cosmere, Brushes with Greatness, 188 Shoreditch High st, London
(2021) Together Through Painting, London Paint Club, Online
(2021) Reflections, The Holy Art Gallery, Online
(2021) While We Wait, The Vacant Museum, Online
(2014) Summer Show, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dulwich, London