Bronwyn Oliver

, where Oliver completed her Masters Oliver was born Bronwyn Gooda on 22 February 1959, in Gum Flat, west of Inverell, in New South Wales. Her parents were Milton, a farmer turned greenkeeper, and Wendy, who worked in a pharmacy. Her creativity was nurtured from a young age. Aged just eight, Oliver attended weekend art classes in Inverell run by Ian Howard, who went on to become dean of the college in Sydney where she would later study. A rift subsequently developed between her and her family that resulted in her having no contact with them for 25 years. After leaving school, Oliver studied and worked in Sydney. She had intended to enrol in painting classes, but a computer error placed her in the sculpture course: she later said "I knew straight away I was in the right place". She graduated from the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in 1980. Winning a New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1983, Upon returning from the United Kingdom, she immediately met with further success, when in 1994 she won a Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship. == Personal life ==

In her early twenties, Bronwyn Gooda married Leslie Oliver, taking his surname and later retaining it "despite a distressing divorce". The artist lived in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Haberfield, where she also had her studio. For 19 years up until her death, she taught art to pre-school age children at Sydney's Cranbrook School in Bellevue Hill. She was a friend of Roslyn Oxley, at whose eponymous gallery Oliver exhibited her works. For the last 22 years of her life, her partner was wine writer Huon Hooke. == Works and exhibitions ==

Biographer Hannah Fink estimated that Oliver produced 290 works over a career of 22 years. Of these, public art works are Oliver's best known sculptures. These include Eyrie, created for Adelaide's Hyatt Hotel in 1993, and Magnolia and Palm, commissioned in 1999 by the Sydney Botanical Gardens, That same year, Big Feathers was commissioned for the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane. It comprises two large feather-shaped forms suspended above the pedestrian precinct, representing "Queen Street's history of parades as well as the mall's connection between earth and sky". In 2000, Oliver's piece Entwine was a finalist in the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, while in the following year, Oliver won the University of New South Wales inaugural sculpture commission competition, with her three-metre-high Globe. Other success followed, when Trace was selected for the National Gallery of Australia's 2002 National Sculpture Prize exhibition. By the 2000s most of Oliver's output constituted commissioned pieces, whether public or private. The most substantial of these is Vine, a 16.5 metre high sculpture installed as part of the $400 million refurbishment of the Sydney Hilton. Taking twelve months to create and requiring a budget of up to half million dollars, the work was completed in 2005. The sculpture was fabricated from 380 kilograms of aluminium, and assembled by a team of eight Croatian welders. By 2006, Oliver had held 18 solo exhibitions of her work, half of them at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which represented her throughout her career as a sculptor. Only one of those solo exhibitions was held outside Australia: a 1992 exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery following a residency. However, Oliver was represented in numerous international group shows, including five during the period 1983 to 1984, around the time she completed her master's degree in London. Four of the group shows at that time were in the United Kingdom; the fifth was at the Museum of Traditional Industries in Kyoto. Subsequent international group shows included 'Five Australian Artists' at Brest's Centre Culturale in 1988, the year she undertook an artist's residency in that city. Later group shows of which Oliver was part included 'Prospect '93' at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 'Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia', which exhibited in several east Asian galleries in 1996, and the Beijing International Biennale in 2003. == Technique ==

A sculptor for her entire artistic career, Oliver used paper, cane or fibreglass for her early works. All 25 works included in the 1995 publication, Bronwyn Oliver: mnemonic chords, were made in copper, though a handful also utilised other materials such as bronze, lead or, in one case, fibreglass. Oliver was always preoccupied with "what materials will do". Fink observed that "[f]rom the beginning, Oliver has been interested in things that are made from the inside out, and her works often give cryptic evidence of their manufacture". That evidence of manufacture was not confined to the works themselves: friends and art critics observed the injuries and marks she carried as a result of working with such unforgiving material. Oliver would produce the more delicate works herself. Many were created by crafting and joining wire to create abstract forms. These were built around moulds, twisting the metal into place with pliers, before severing it with wirecutters. Joins were soldered or brazed (though in some pieces, the wire was woven). In Web (2002), copper pieces were sewn together using wire. Her partner Huon Hooke described her at work in the studio: She is sitting cross-legged on the floor, on a piece of foam rubber. Her work is on a low bench constructed of timber covered with fireproof bricks...The tiny jeweller's blowtorch is in her right hand, the big bottles of oxygen and acetylene standing behind her. In her left is the brazing rod and she's making one of the thousands of joints that make up a new sculpture, the fire licking at the fireproof cement covering the polystyrene mould as well as curling around the tiny piece of cooper wire which is being joined. Major pieces were created at Crawfords Casting foundry in Enfield in Sydney's inner western suburbs. Although the foundry would fabricate the elements of the sculptures, Oliver would still undertake the initial stages, training foundry staff and supervising their activity. Some of the pieces assembled to create the sculptures were made using copper rod, while others were formed using the lost-wax casting technique. Individual pieces would take up to two months to complete. == Themes and critical reception ==

|alt=A sixteen-metre-high sculpture made out of many aluminium wires, brazed together in a structure suggesting the form of a giant, curling vine |alt=A three-metre-diameter globe-shaped bronze sculpture fabricated out of brazed copper alloy wire Oliver was not one to intellectualise her creativity: she preferred to talk about the process of creating her artworks rather than their meanings. Journalist Catherine Keenan's 2005 description of how the towering sculpture demonstrated both aesthetic and production values are typical of comments about Oliver's work: The Sydney Morning Herald's art writer, John McDonald, said of her work "It often seems to me she's only got one tune, but it's a pretty good tune". == Death and legacy ==

Oliver was sometimes characterised as reclusive in both the artistic and social worlds. though others writing shortly after her death did not indicate that the relationship with Hooke had ended, including an obituary by Howard, one written by art critic John McDonald, and tributes by her two biographers, Felicity Fenner and Hannah Fink. Some years later, author Katrina Strickland interviewed people close to Oliver, and reported they had noticed a gradual deterioration in her personality over a period of years; she became "reclusive, obsessive, anxious" as well as "difficult and impatient, and completely obsessed with her diet." Under the circumstances, Hooke had felt he "just wanted to be somewhere else" and left the relationship in late May 2006. At that point, Strickland recounted, "Oliver fell to pieces". Her friend Roslyn Oxley subsequently concluded that, at some point, Oliver made plans to die of suicide. Journalist Sunanda Creagh interviewed Oxley, as the gallerist prepared the last exhibition of her friend's work: Oliver died of suicide on 10 July 2006. In the year following, Oliver was amongst 60 artists profiled in Sonia Payes' book Untitled.Portraits of Australian Artists, while in 2008 her final works were included in the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art. The resale art market has returned up to seven-figure sums for her works at auction; in 2007 a record for Oliver's work was set when Skein (2004) went under the hammer for $192,000. By 2010, Sydney Biennale chairman Luca Belgiorno-Nettis was reported to have paid $300,000 for one of Oliver's sculptures, titled Tracery, and in November 2024 her monumental 2000 work Tide fetched $1M at auction, breaking the record for Australian sculpture. In 2011, Sydney's College of Fine Arts announced that its new sculpture studio would be named after Oliver. Works by Oliver are held in most major Australian art collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, Wollongong City Gallery, Orange Regional Gallery, and the Australian government's collection Artbank. The first "comprehensive survey of 50 key works, from the mid-1980s to the final solo exhibition in 2006" was held in Tarrawarra Museum of Art in Healesville, Victoria from 19 November 2016 to 5 February 2017. == See also ==