Olivia Austin

Artist Statement

My work examines how systems of value—social, economic, spiritual, and natural—shape human experience. Working across drawing, painting, and object-based practices, I use found and fabricated materials to explore questions of hierarchy, objecthood, and inheritance, particularly as they emerge through Southern material culture.

I am interested in how meaning accumulates through use, labor, and belief. Domestic textiles, worn clothing, wood, currency, and devotional forms appear throughout my work as both surface and structure, carrying histories of touch, restraint, care, and pressure. The body—often rendered in states of vulnerability, endurance, or suspension—functions as a site where these systems become visible and felt.

Rather than narrating singular events, my work attends to conditions: the forces that precede action, shape agency, and persist over time. Through restraint, repetition, and material tension, I aim to create objects that hold complexity without resolution, inviting viewers to consider how inherited structures quietly organize emotional, physical, and social life.