Olive Burgess



I have extensive motivation for material exploration, probably derrived from my farming upbringing where time was spent shuffling around looking for moments or parts to assemble as a means of passing time and making meaning. I have a deep relationship to the processes of nature, time and the weather, and a voracious interest in art thinking and history. In my practice, I look to find materially appropriate ways of presenting images and translating story.  For me, a driving concern as an artist is community and access, particularly for and with people outside of metropolitan environments. This is where I learn and grow the most. In my practice I seek to decentralise western, dualistic systems of living, thinking, being and creating, which is a notion I work to understand deeper everyday. 

Further resulting from my upbringing, engaging with landscape, nature and ecofeminist research is imperative to growing and engaging with art making. I have a preference for analogue, and what’s outside, however printmaking, paper and ink is where I get the most excited. Since graduating in 2024 from Sydney College of the Arts under supervision from Rebecca Beardmore, which was a huge gift to say the least, my practice has been transforming into a larger and larger web of circulating ideas, printmaking, object making, note taking, image making, reading, story writing and documentation-as-practice. This has been wonderfully encouraged by my time on Residence at Megalo Print Studio, on Ngunnawal country and while visiting and being on Residence in Ireland, moving between the west coast and Dublin. In 2024 I was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro SCA Travel Scholarship which funded this residency project.