Olivia Longstaff’s work focuses on a meaningful engagement with the stuff of paint. Olivia is interested in the formal elements of painting and the simple manipulation of its characteristics. She explores the conversation between the application of paint and the physicality of the surface on which it’s applied.
The work is determined by the restriction of space where she works. Unstretched and unprimed canvas allows the material to be folded and manipulated to fit the space. Olivia uses the immediacy of the paintings to encourage them to walk a line between something that is in the process of being formed and something that is falling apart. Olivia uses a set of clear decisions about scale, material, colour palette and composition that provide a framework for the intuitive and improvised application and manipulation of paint.
In this series of paintings, there is a growing fluency in accepting the accidental and in moving between thicker gesture and stained trace and residue that enables her to both animate the paintings’ surface and to suggest increasingly complex, shifting spaces.
