Just the Bones

It is unusual for an Australian institution to purchase such a full body of formative work as it has done with Bronwyn Oliver’s nine early works, made between 1984 and 1987. Three of these were included in her first exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, in 1986; five in her exhibitions with Christine Abrahams in Melbourne in 1986 and 1987. All the works are made of fibreglass and paper, some with lead and brass parts. They mark Oliver’s transition from working freeform in paper and cane to moulding with resin and clay and precede her complete switch to metal in 1988. While a far cry from the elegant venation of the later works, these plump objects are fabulous in their own right: experimental, playful, works of fierce imagination. Together, they contain the energy of Oliver’s nascence as an artist. Just as parts of these works resemble the shrugged-off sheath of a giant slug, in them we experience the artist’s working through of ideas, the sloughing off of the carapace of experiment in pursuit of her own Ur-form.

In 1984 Oliver was 25 years old. She was living in England, after winning the New South Wales’ Travelling Art Scholarship, completing a master’s degree in Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art. In Sydney, she had received an exemplary education in sculpture at Alexander Mackie College from Brian O’Dwyer and in conceptual and performance art with Ian Howard. Here she learned that to make good art you needed to be able to put yourself on the line, to be pristine in thought and shameless in imagination. Howard invited Oliver to a week-long student bush-workshop conducted by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, and she was present at the Sculpture Centre in the Rocks in 1977 when Mike Parr horrified his audience by pretending to chop his arm off (he was born with part of one arm missing). Oliver’s own early performance work involved wrapping her body entirely in bandages and being trapped in a phone booth bound with rope. In England, she focused on making objects. It was the era of New British Sculpture; one of her tutors was Richard Deacon, and she lived in a share-house with Anish Kapoor.

It was in England that ‘things really started to take off ’.¹ She was experimenting with paper and cane, working with spirals, thinking through her hands. ‘I have never been so intensely involved with my work’, she reflected.

Hermaphrodite 1984, was the last work Oliver made in England. It was also her first work using fibreglass and — more importantly — the first work using metal. Made with paper and resin over a chicken-wire mould, it is a large pot ‘that stands on its own three legs’ with little lead hoofs. It is carnivalesque, ornamented with curls like rams’ horns painted in blue and orange stripes, and plated with bright brass shingles like a golden pangolin. Oliver referred to these curls as ‘dongs’ — a slang word for penis — hence the title; the fact that it has three legs suggests it is, as a hermaphrodite might be, another gender. The curls, or spirals, were made from a hollow snake-shape or tail, like a stocking for a long talon, a form that became an archetype and would appear throughout her oeuvre. Hair, too, was a persistent motif: in this, sharpened cane spikes bristle in the crevices of the thighs.

Hermaphrodite took two arduous months to make, a labour-intensive process of trial and error. It was planned as the fourth work, along with Armie, Smiles and Unicorn (all made in 1984), to be included in Paper Trails, an exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool. Oliver finished it the night before the opening, getting up at 4am to deliver it to Liverpool strapped in a crate to the roof of her little turquoise 2CV (‘very slow because of sculpture on top/wind’). She destroyed several companion works made in England but brought Hermaphrodite and Unicorn back to Australia. (Unicorn, a large slit crustacean that lies on the floor, was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales as a condition of the Travelling Art Scholarship).

The first work she made on her return to Sydney was clumsy: it took a while for her to get her hand back in. The second work, Os 1985, with the meaning, from the Latin, of bone, was inspired by a ‘leathery palaeolithic shell’ she had seen in the Natural History Museum in London. This imaginary creature appears to ooze out of its armour, with its wide gummy smile like a toothless shark and flesh the texture of marshmallow; bright red spikes hide beneath its lead gills, like poisonous eyelashes. It also seems to be writhing, its pincers tucked around its torso as it rocks forward, craning a non-existent neck. It is a fantastic object, mimicking nature in all its weirdness and particularity. Later, Oliver did away with colour, with flesh, with story — left, as she said, with ‘just the bones, exposing the life still inside’. As a little girl, she and her sister Helen would fossick in the mud flats at Tingha, a tin-mining ghost town in New South Wales where her Grandmother lived, fascinated by the fossils and bones and bits of metal buried in the red dirt; as an adult, she loved nothing better than to spend hours in archaeological and natural history museums, with an especial penchant for medieval armour and weaponry. Survivor 1988, one of the earliest works made entirely of metal, has the same craning shape as Os, like a pet creature that has just been stroked, its copper tiles standing on end, like ruffled fur, preening for more.

‘Ros Oxley visit 10am–11.30. (!@!!*)’, she wrote in her diary on 12 September 1985. Oliver had written to Roslyn Oxley inviting her to visit her studio above the Moveable Feast in Surry Hills. Oxley was instantly convinced by Oliver, even though there was not much more than a few newspaper patterns and the stench of resin to go on, and offered her a show in April the following year. Oliver was working on Mantle 1985, a kind of inverse version of Unicorn, a croissant-shaped crustacean punctured by large open suckers. It was titled Mantle both because it was a shell but also because it glowed, like a gas lantern: she papered the inside of the sculpture with pale pink tissue, the colour of flesh, which radiated in natural light. Siren 1985, made in November, is one of her most explicitly sexual works, an outsized shell with lips like a giant vagina. Oliver liked to conflate references, to work against the literal: it is shaped like a volute but put together like a clam; it could also be a coiled chignon or patisserie.

However, any sexual reference is not left in doubt by the back of the sculpture, which is joined as a pair of elongated buttocks; the shells are wrapped in thin elasticised bandages (like her student performances), creating an almost human venation on the surface.

Os, Mantle and Siren were included in the exhibition at Roslyn Oxley, along with Stiletto 1986, a fantastic marine animal doing a backflip, and Carapace 1986, an unsuccessful work that the artist later destroyed. (Oliver’s ex-husband Les Oliver remembered walking down Crown Street in Surry Hills in Sydney and seeing chopped up fibreglass sculptures sticking out of rubbish bins.) None of the works sold: until their purchase this year by the National Gallery, two (Mantle and Siren, as well as Hermaphrodite) were stored under Oliver’s family home in Inverell, like giant fossils buried under the floorboards (luckily, in perfect dry conditions).

Helmet 1 1986, made in December, marks the first time Oliver used copper. Brass she found ‘a bit tinny, a bit too shiny — the fingermarks were annoying’; lead, apart from being poisonous, was unwieldy; but copper, which within two years she would use exclusively, ‘becomes organic’. In this, Oliver plays with the idea of inside and outside, of hard and soft: is the creature soft inside with a hard shell, or is the armour the self? Heart 1988, (Art Gallery of South Australia) made of rivetted copper strips and one of the first works made entirely of metal, is hollow. Up until this point Oliver had used ephemeral materials; from now onwards, she would use durable materials to depict ephemerality.

All Oliver’s works, both early and late, have the immediacy of action, whether violent or subtle (and they are sometimes both). In this way they are like the aftershocks of performance, like the moment after Mike Parr chopped off his meat-filled prosthetic arm: they have an intense presence, the vividness of emergency. Blade 1987, is flat like a stingray, or a flattened trumpet (another archetype), edged with a lead blade. There is a trunk or a post puncturing its stomach, like the tube for a stoma: is it feeding the object or injuring it? It is both creature and instrument, a wounded weapon; as Deborah Hart has observed, there is always an edge to Oliver’s work, in this case literally so. Lot’s Wife 1987, a favourite work of the artist, could be a charming figure were it not for the curved lance piercing its genitals. With its gold-plated bracelets and pointed toes, it is saucy and scary, wounded yet victorious like an ancient saint. As a sculpture, it is perfectly poised, a balance off-kilter with the violence it describes.

Ladder 1987, is the most sophisticated work in the group, the endpoint of Oliver’s exploration of the possibilities of cane and paper. It is an intellectual conundrum, a puzzling convolution of inside and out, mass and space, at once perplexing and completely convincing. No matter how long one looks at it, it is hard to understand how the threading of the tubes work; it looks like something that is logical and functional, but it isn’t. She makes absence tangible, felt as a presence: she knew how to make space real. Oliver had a terrifying intellect, and here it shows.

‘In my sculpture an idea has succeeded if the finished object resonates with a set of related and competing associations,’ she wrote in 1993. She liked to work as nature does, in terms of metaphor, or metonym, in series across genus and species. She steals God’s toolkit, as it were, to make her own variations on his themes, using the grammar of nature to invent her own language. It is not entirely coincidental that she used Biblical titles (Arc and Lot’s Wife) — like those of the Creator, her inventions are proliferate, infinitely varied, cunning. In these works she combines the most outlandish protuberances — tusks, fangs, dongs — with the most suggestive orifices to make objects that are simultaneously alluring and repulsive. To seduce is to corrupt (from the Latin seducere), and there is always something a little sinister in her objects. She liked to shock. ‘I haven’t made an innocent work in a long time’, she would say with a smile.

It is extraordinary that these fragile works are intact. The National Gallery of Australia is to be applauded for this decisive acquisition, and it is to be hoped that it will continue to lead the charge in collecting and exhibiting the work of this important artist. No major public institution has yet staged a retrospective of Oliver’s work. The general public has not been given the opportunity to experience her oeuvre in its totality, and in the end it is the public, not critics or collectors, who will confirm Oliver’s place in the pantheon of our national culture.

Bronwyn Oliver's work is on display in exhibition Deep inside my heart from 25 November 2023 to 19 May 2024.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.