Olivia Bernard’s exhibition What Remains…features both large and more intimately scaled sculptures, as well as collages. This recent work evolved from a heightened sense of mortality, and personal experiences of aging and grief, while it also references the current global chaos.
Working from the inside out, Bernard draws on the sensate experiences of the body—skin, muscle, and tissue; tensing, relaxing, and shifting. Her process begins as she touches and physically manipulates materials, combining plaster with paper and wire, collaged elements with glass, and integrating mysterious small objects that appear to be cast-offs from an unknown event. Suggesting maps and organic forms, her pieces merge process with meaning. Perched between isolation and emergence from a pandemic, she reflects on the fragility and vulnerability of human life, and life on planet earth. Emerging from these dark themes, Bernard’s creation of spirals and fertile shapes also suggests resilience, playfulness, evolution, and growth.
Olivia Bernard is a visual artist who has exhibited widely in New England, including at the Smith College Museum of Art, the Rose Art Museum, the Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Brattleboro Museum, the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass Amherst, as well as Marymount Manhattan College and the Carter Burden Gallery, both in New York City. Bernard is the recipient of a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship and held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Women’s Studio Workshop. She received a BA in Art History from Brown University and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. She has taught sculpture at numerous colleges in the northeast. Bernard divides her time between Western Massachusetts and New York City.