Exhibition Artist Statement:

Olivia Arnold is an Australian multidisciplinary artist. She uses textiles, drawing and printmaking techniques in her process driven practice. Arnold recently completed her MFA at the National Art School (Sydney) where she created installations that acted as spaces of safety, combined with unnerving elements that produced the Freudian idea of the uncanny. Through interactions with places of vulnerability, specifically beds and bedrooms, it reflected on the ways one retreats to soft and comforting spaces.

Arnold continues the use of fabric in her exhibition ‘Bellevue’, an ode to her childhood home on Bellevue Street, Sydney, and the currently volatile state of the Australian environment due to climate change. Like her MFA project, this body of work explores both the comforting and frightening aspects of her environment. Much of the work has been completed outside in nature, using plants to print and dye the surfaces on which Arnold has used. There are also 35mm images of the interior of Arnold’s childhood home, collaged with colours and textures of their exterior world. Arnold is interested in displaying the multifaceted, and often contradictory, planes of the human experience. This nostalgia, paired with fear for the future, plagues many of her generation and is becoming a universal sentiment, crossing borders and language barriers.

25% of any sales from the exhibition will be donated to the New South Wales Fire Service, to assist in fighting the terrible bush fires sweeping through Arnold’s home state.