Tag: Olivia Bax

Olivia Bax is a British sculptor known for colourful, large-scale works that transform everyday materials into energetic and often unexpectedly playful forms. Working primarily with paper, cardboard, glue, paint and steel armatures, Bax builds sculptures through an additive process, layering and modelling materials until familiar structures give way to strange, bodily and abstract forms. Her distinctive surfaces retain traces of their making, giving the work a tactile physicality that sits somewhere between drawing, painting and sculpture.

Process is central to Bax’s practice. Rather than beginning with a predetermined final form, she allows sculptures to develop through making, responding to the behaviour of materials and the changing relationships between volume, balance and space. Handles, loops, openings and vessel-like structures frequently appear within the work, suggesting objects that might be carried, inhabited or used while resisting any clear function. Bright colour further complicates their physical presence, giving often substantial sculptures a sense of movement and lightness.

Drawing on the visual languages of abstraction, architecture and everyday objects, Bax creates works that encourage viewers to move around them and discover continually shifting perspectives. Her sculptures can appear simultaneously improvised and carefully constructed, monumental and humorous, combining an intuitive approach to material with a sophisticated understanding of space. Through this distinctive sculptural language, Olivia Bax explores how ordinary materials can be transformed into objects that feel unfamiliar, animated and entirely their own.