Description
Artist: Olivia Mattison
Our Year of Rest and Relaxation: a love letter to Kira who loaned me my first Ottessa Moshfegh book
ceramic
9 in x 6 in
2021
Olivia Mattison is a Vancouver based student and artist, currently dragging out her
B.F.A for as long as possible at Emily Carr University. After six years of mistakes in Vancouver- both academic and personal- Olivia has formed an interdisciplinary practice firmly grounded in her own experiences.
Whether this stems from a tenuously repressed childhood memory or a deep-seated narcissistic personality disorder; Olivia’s works are probes into her own unstable sense of self as she flails around desperately trying to understand herself and the world around her.
Much to her surprise, this (literal) vanity project connects to people other than herself.
No matter what medium Olivia uses to create these images of herself they are
stand-ins; stand-ins not just for the gross and unhappy parts of Olivia but for everyone who feels that way.
Olivia’s real joy in art making (and ostensibly her only real talent) is that after almost a decade of periodically trying to off herself, she is intimately familiar with all the nasty, upsetting and repulsive parts of herself; and most importantly how to laugh at them.
Through her art Olivia uses her own depression, anxiety, humour, her occasional victories and more frequent failures, to create a language which can help others speak about their own similar experiences.
