Seemingly moving in stillness - always holding the potential of collapse, or flight.

Movement in Oliver’s work begins with the idea of inventing expressive bodies: sculptural forms we relate to through our own embodied, individual selves.
Oliver thinks about movement as something that generates joy, rhythm and vitality, a way of stepping outside the human body and becoming something else entirely. These ideas have been shaped and sharpened through conversations with dancer Tyrone Isaac, Franck Jeuffroy, Stuart and dancer, artist and long-time friend Luka Vardiashvili, where dance becomes a way of understanding sculpture and sculpture a way of imagining movement.
Dance is one way Oliver explores the body we are. Sculpture allows that exploration to slip into fantasy, science fiction, the futuristic and the ancient - a timeless space where archetypes surface and dissolve. Some believe these forms speak from another planet, another dimension. Where do they come from? Imagination and whatever that mysterious *this* is.
Oliver feels these bodies into being. Whether moving or still, they suggest motion, as if they might begin at any moment.
His work is deeply influenced by Carolee Schneemann, Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely - sculpture as text for movement, freedom and poetry. Schneemann especially, where the body itself becomes movement, sculpture and language.
Conversations with scientists such as Huia-Ti Lin and Naomi Nakayama at Imperial College, about dragonfly wing geometry, dandelion seeds responding to moisture and active geometry shaping flight, feed Oliver’s obsession with the everyday miracle of things flying. Effortlessness. Potential. Levitation like in dreams.
Movement as joy. As rhythm. As life-giving.
Abstract, invented body thingees.

Written by Giada Holland
for ArtULTRA
​

5 6 7 - blue (2021)

Between 6 December 2025 - 15 February 2026  my sculptures and drawings are on display at the ArtULTRA showroom in London.
To arrange a viewing please contact [email protected]