Chatting with Artist Olivia Sterling! Hear us visit the following 3D captures:

After Olivia and I visit her exhibitions you can also hear her impressions of one of her peers exhibitions exhibited in the same space, a few weeks before. Listen along as Olivia gives her impressions of Elsa Rouy’s Cheeky sex nymphs in her show Plastic doesn’t sweat:

About this Episode

In this episode, Olivia Sterling and I visit and discuss her exhibition “It clings like a leech” We also visit her awesome studio in the epic, ROTUNDUS home of the former BBC Social Club. Follow the 3D Capture links included to visit the shows along with us!

Born in Peterborough in 1996 and graduating from the RCA in 2020, Olivia Sterling has carved out a distinctive niche in using paint to address questions of blackness and whiteness in twenty-first century Britain. Colour, in her work, is both hedonism and neurosis. Her Day-Glo pigments and swooping, comic-book outlines are a raucous pleasure for the eyes; yet her signature ‘tagging’ of colour blocks with letters and numbers points to the obsessive compartmentalisation of skin tones and identities, a minefield of labels that invokes the shadow of racialised discourse. The use of everyday settings and subjects – which seem to spill over the edges of Sterling’s zoomed-in frames – points to the subtle ways in which even anodyne objects and scenes are encoded with structures of othering and difference, while stressing the fact that this is a drama that continues beyond the canvas.

Olivia’s show “It clings like a leech” is now available on Custorian. Her exhibition was one of thirteen shown as a collaboration between GUTS gallery and Soft Punk magazine. During the final thirteen weeks of 2020, Olivia’s show was displayed in the arch behind Haggerston station in London.

This episode is censored, an un-beeped version is available on Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/user-18437174/05-art-adventures-olivia-sterling-uncensored.?