Salisbury, U.K.
New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park
The sheer physicality of Olivia Bax’s sculpture is disarming. Her works engage the viewer in a way that immediately draws the body in close, inviting touch and interrogation of their curious forms, even if only through visual touch. This experience of encounter surely comes from the physical energy that Bax expends in fabrication—bending, pulling, and twisting steel into place to create armatures that can support the unique mixture of paper pulp, PVA glue, and household paint that she presses, pushes, builds, and molds into structures that often defy inside and outside. The skeletal steel frameworks might be hidden beneath the paper pulp or extrude beyond its limits, and touch and pressure are evident on the works’ molded surfaces. Looking in, through, and across the surfaces of these sculptures, a psychological charge emerges and develops, unfolding in time and space.
The eight sculptures featured in “Handrailing” (on view through November 10, 2024) lead visitors through the New Art Centre’s Gallery and Orangery, always alert to the enormity of the landscape beyond the windows, yet remaining focused on the largely human scale of the work itself. Color is central to the energy of Bax’s forms. Rather than being applied to the surface, it is integral to the paper pulp mixture. While Bax works intuitively, never planning or making conscious reference to other works, certain sights and experiences inevitably leach into the work. The exhibition title—a term for navigation aids or guides used to keep hikers on track—and the titles of works such as Cairn (2022) reference hillwalking quite directly. In Great Catch (2024), numerous tent pegs hang off the external steel armature, like carabiners on a climbing rope. Great Catch appears at one and the same time as a figure in the landscape and a rock formation whose surface can be scaled, its caverns explored. Yet, neither of these things is quite right. Bax does not represent the exterior of things; instead, she presents experiences from the inside. Given this context, her internal/external armatures make perfect sense. This is the experience of the body from the inside out in all its rawness and vulnerability.
Not everything is serious in Bax’s work, and there is certainly room for play. In Funhole (2024), a bulbous belly-like structure opens partially to reveal its interior. Supported on three spindly legs that end in three dolly wheels, it is mobile, precarious, and free—a perfect example of Bax’s concern with bringing sculpture and display together in a way that resonates with the work of the late Phyllida Barlow. Bax inherited household paint from Barlow’s studio and incorporated some of those colors (blue, pink, and mustard yellow) into the skin of Funhole. There is no ambiguity in Bax’s use of color: deep and embedded, it runs though the work entirely, like a seam running through a rockface or hillside. If sculpture is thinking through making, then this gesture to include Barlow’s paint as material is a prompt to look back in order to move forward. There is no imitation here, simply one sculptor’s respect for and acknowledgement of another.
Monkey Cups (2018), which fills the Orangery with its vibrant energy, calls forth a contradiction of emotions. There is a joyfulness about this work, coming partly from its name and the “cheeky monkey” moniker that denotes mischievousness and playfulness, and partly from visual associations with the exhilaration of funfair rides. The curves of its interior equally suggest the safety of a womb-like space, while its exterior arc echoes an arm around the shoulders and the comfort that gesture can bring. Once again, there is a slippage between inside and outside, between skeleton and exoskeleton, between tools and appendages, balance and precariousness, skin and sensation. The slippage between interior and exterior is evident in the gallery setting, too. Stepping outside into the grounds and looking back through the windows provides a different view of Bax’s “Handrailing,” one that simultaneously draws us in and sets us off walking through the landscape with an entirely fresh energy, ripe for a new, richer experience of the surrounding world.
