Weathering:
Exploring poetic and precarious encounters between body and earth, artist Olivia Ronan entangles her practice with roots, rust, soil, seeds, sticks and the physical disintegration and decomposition of materials over time. In process she actively plays with counterpoints reflecting the tensions, dichotomies, and transitory nature of people and plants as co-creating agents of weathering. Her performances are made across sites and are recorded using a camera placed spontaneously and unceremoniously on the ground. This documentation gathers trace moments and is an interrogation on environmental chaos and the ways we collectively shape and are shaped by one another.
Olivia Ronan is a Canadian born artist who grew up drifting the United States. Multiple moves and a nomadic upbringing taught her to find a sense of belonging in an ever evolving relationship with the ecology, specifically to plants. The larger motivation of her art practice is to reframe relationships between plants and people by exploring the ways we conflict and coexist with each other and the transience and rootedness of our interwoven life cycles. She graduated from UCSC in 2019 with a BFA in Studio Art. She has completed Artist-In-Residencies with San Jose Museum of Quilt & Textiles, the Vashon Artist Residency, Vashon Island WA , and The Sable Project Stockbridge VT (Fall 2022), and Winslow House Project, Vallejo CA. In 2022 and 2023 she was awarded the Arts Council Santa Cruz Cultivate Grant. Her performance work has been featured at Indexical and at Minnow Arts, Santa Cruz CA.