Olivia Harwood, Huntress
October 4 - November 8, 2024
One Grand Gallery is pleased to welcome Portland-based artist Olivia Harwood with a collection of new paintings and three dimensional works. Huntress unapologetically explores self-defense mechanisms in nature through evocative self-portraiture and sculpture.
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What transformations happen within the hour of the dog turning into the wolf? Are there scales glistening in the moonlight? Are there quills and coarse hairs protruding through skin? Does a mother’s teeth sharpen into points preparing to defend her cubs? This metamorphosis encapsulates the feelings I want to display in my work. Within my self portraits, I reveal and depict my own experiences to create a platform for discussion about bodily autonomy, reproductive rights and self defense. I rewrite and take control over my own traumatic events and memories by surrounding my body with household and natural objects of protection.
Recently studying self defense mechanisms found in nature, I have noticed an overlap of these animalistic behaviors to my life as a woman in the city. Camouflage, armor and safety in numbers are just a few that can easily translate into my daily life. How am I interacting with the city in a similar way crows are? Do they get threatened? Do they find shelter in groups? Intertwining femininity, animalistic rage, girlhood and anger creates relatable monstrous feminine archetypes that I hope inspire and light fires within my audience.
The barbs on a blackberry bush, the quills on a porcupine and the poison on a tree frog not only protect against natural predators, but defend against man. The empathy and fondness I have with flora and fauna inspires me to write love letters in the forms of paintings. Deer, rabbits, fish, birds and dogs accompany my figures, creating a bond and companionship. I fondly caress them with my paint strokes to display them in a loving manner. Inspired by board games, girlhood wonder and folklore, my compositions pull the viewer in with eye contact and intensity. Household objects, trinkets and scavenged sea glass swirl around my surreal paintings and sculptures to catch the eye of the viewer like the shine of an earring on the asphalt.
I look at Oregon ferns the same way I look at my collected shells from the beaches of Florida where my family lives. My dreamscapes are often inspired by the locations I reside in, Wisconsin, Oregon and Florida are where I call home. The rich color palette of the work will transport the audience to these familiar terrains, providing both nostalgic and unsettling emotions. These environmental niches meld together in my phantasmagorical scenes. They are doors to my interior worlds that display trauma, rage and deep emotions.
Themes of motherhood and bodily autonomy are dispersed throughout the works .The monstrous feminine swallows me whole when it comes to my reproductive rights, and I will do anything I can to protect them. The paintings on display will dive deeper into the companionship between animals and women. I aim to bridge the protective and wild force of a mother defending her offspring alongside a woman who is defending herself against man.
Olivia Faith Harwood (b. 1999, San Diego, CA, she/her) is a painter who currently resides in Portland, OR. She received her BFA in Painting at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2021. Harwood has recently received a Regional Arts and Culture Council Spring 2024 Arts3C Grant. She recently has been published in the 2022 Portland Critics Pick in Artforum, Spring 2022 Art & About Portland Blog and the Buckman Journal Issue 011, Uncanny. Harwood exhibited a solo show at Fuller Rosen Gallery in 2022, with two upcoming solo shows at One Grand Gallery in Portland, OR in October 2024 and a second solo show with Fuller Rosen Gallery in April, 2025.
Press:
Willamette Week
Variable West
EverOut
Travel Portland
@oliviafaithharwood
oliviaharwood.com