page_title: Bronwyn Oliver
section_title: Themes and critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: Bronwyn Oliver / Themes and critical reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Vine (2005), a sculpture by Bronwyn Oliver
context_page_description: Bronwyn Joy Oliver was an Australian sculptor whose work primarily consisted of metalwork. Oliver was raised in rural New South Wales. She trained at Sydney's Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education and London's Chelsea School of Art. She had early success, winning a New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1981 and the Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship in 1984. Oliver settled in Sydney, where she practised and taught until her death in 2006.
  Oliver's sculptures are admired for their tactile nature, aesthetics, and technical skills demonstrated in their production. In her later career, most of her pieces were both public and private commissions. Her major works include Vine, a 16.5-metre-high sculpture in the Sydney Hilton, Magnolia and Palm, in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, and Big Feathers in Brisbane's Queen Street Mall. Recognition of her work included selection as a finalist in the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award in 2000, inclusion in the National Gallery of Australia's 2002 National Sculpture Prize exhibition, and being shortlisted for the 2006 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award.
context_section_description: Oliver was not one to intellectualise her creativity: she preferred to talk about the process of creating her artworks rather than their meanings. Asked about how she approached her art, she stated:
  My work is about structure and order. It is a pursuit of a kind of logic: a formal, sculptural logic and poetic logic. It is a conceptual and physical process of building and taking away at the same time. I set out to strip the ideas and associations down to (physically and metaphorically) just the bones, exposing the life still held inside.
  While Oliver was reluctant to discuss meaning in her works, critics have identified recurring themes. Hannah Fink, like art critic John McDonald, noted that there is a pattern to the shapes and structures in Oliver's work. Fink described this as "a consistent vocabulary of elemental forms – the spiral, meander, loop and sphere – in a repertoire of signature archetypes". McDonald said that Nature is "omnipresent" and referred to them as organisms or their remains.
  Despite their organic appearance, Oliver's own view was that her work was not grounded in nature's structures.  Nevertheless, critics have identified the lifelike qualities of early pieces that resembled shells, claws or tails, or noted the apparent similarities to biological forms. McDonald commented that "For Oliver to deny nature is akin to Balthus saying there is nothing erotic about his paintings or Rothko claiming his works aren't abstract." Both major reviews of Oliver's work published in her lifetime (Fenner's 1995 essay and Fink's 2002 journal article) draw attention to dualism and contradiction in the sculptures: Fenner describes them as "delicate and ephemeral, [yet] structurally robust and durable"; Fink sees them as "ethereal but solid, fluid yet rigid, open but closed".
  Oliver's sculptures are admired for their tactile nature, their aesthetics, and the technical skills demonstrated in their production.
  Particular works have been singled out for praise. A writer reviewing Vine in the Sydney Hilton admired how it "curls like a fairy tale beanstalk up towards the ceiling as though empowered by the sunlight streaming in from a large open space adjacent". Journalist Catherine Keenan's 2005 description of how the towering sculpture demonstrated both aesthetic and production values are typical of comments about Oliver's work:
  It has the delicate, adamantine beauty that characterises many of her pieces, but is also an engineering marvel: 380 kilograms of metal that was delivered on the back of an oversized truck and now hangs from a single specially manufactured rod fixed to the ceiling.
  The Sydney Morning Herald's art writer, John McDonald, said of her work "It often seems to me she's only got one tune, but it's a pretty good tune". He later elaborated:
  It is a cliche that every artist keeps making the same work, but in Oliver's case, while some forms resemble sea creatures and others the buds of plants, the family ties between even the most diverse pieces are very strong ... nothing was dashed off or thrown together. Every piece feels as if it has been minutely considered, with each strand of copper wire being brazed into exactly the right spot ... All the things that have recently been said about Oliver – that she was beautiful, intelligent, charming – could also be said about the work.
  
  Despite this consistency in her output and the coherent themes of her oeuvre, variety was also present. Critic Bruce James considered her 2002 exhibition, and in particular one small work titled Crackled, to demonstrate a broader artistic range: "Crackled is ... formally surprising, evidence that Oliver is not content to rely on a winning recipe of convolution for her concepts. Whole new areas of physical and artistic exploration lay open before her". Hannah Fink, reflecting on Oliver's last sculptures, wrote:
  The mastery of her last works seems to defy imagining – one can only marvel at the ingenuity of their construction and the perfection of their realisation. The utter variety of her posthumous exhibition ... put paid to any suggesti
caption: Vine (2005), in the Sydney Hilton Hotel
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