Olivia Bax’s studio space is located in an industrial site in Peckham, London, being this a five minute walk from her current solo show, ‘Roost’. Olivia’s room is compact. It’s hard to imagine how her large-scale sculptural works can be prepared in this space. In fact, Bax has recently moved to this bigger studio, and is enjoying the liberation of extra space, reflecting upon the larger scale of her recent works. Her mood board consists of photographs – these being close-ups of road works, brutalist structures, and geometrical city-scapes. Balconies, being bumpy, soft, and curved, sticked and stacked with hard, precise, almost mathematical scaffolding references. “I like having a wall of imagery to keep me thinking. I keep experiments around me as reminders.” she adds, “I try and keep an area ‘clean’ for drawing. Ideally, I would have three spaces – a storage space, a large dirty space for making, and a smaller clean space for thinking and drawing.”Her day-to-day changes, but a good day for Olivia is when she leaves the studio filthy, with material in her hair, and up her arms; it is no surprise that the artist has worn the same studio trainers for 5 years! Losing track of time, the artist admits to write a list to remind herself what needs doing. When she is in the middle of making work for a show and the finished work seems unclear, that is, for her, the best part of the process.
