Deutscher and Hackett

With identical annular forms leaning against each other and linked in an eternal embrace, Bronwyn Oliver’s sculpture of Two rings + two, 2005 evokes completeness and interdependence with a striking geometric simplicity. Crafted from her signature hand-woven copper wire, the two toruses are fully enclosed, perfectly formed, with no beginning and no end. Trapped within the hollow centre of each ring is a movable sphere, woven with the same angular pattern. The smooth sophistication and balance of Two rings + two reveals the late sculptor at the pinnacle of her powers, building on the essential forms, skilful techniques and recurrent concepts of her practice with each new work.
 
In her 2017 monograph on the immensely respected contemporary sculptor, Hannah Fink explains that Oliver inherited, through her education at Alexander Mackie College, Lyndon Dadswell’s concept of space flowing through a sculpture.1 Oliver’s repertoire of fundamental sculptural shapes — spiral, loop, funnel, tube, disc, and sphere — provided in their static volumes an expression of rotational movement, an essential elemental and rhythmic force. In the final years of her brief life, the resolved forms of the sphere and the ring inspired some Oliver’s most elegant and self-assured compositions.
 
In 2005, responding to the successes of recent public commissions, including Vine, 2005 her largest work, installed at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney in May of that year, Bronwyn Oliver dedicated herself to her craft with yet more unbridled energy and passion. Here a new accelerated rhythm of working, ‘halfway between commission and exhibition’, allowed for the production of small-scale sculptures that could also be presented as proposal concepts for larger public commissions.2 Capitalising on the iterative propulsion of her artistic ideas, Oliver created during this period a series of paired works, one large and one small, each form containing the conceptual potential for the next. Existing alongside the pair of works titled Two rings, the monumental fabrication (installed at Tarrawarra Museum of Art) and its painstakingly hand-crafted maquette (private collection), Two rings + two is the only version of this visual concept to include a sphere within its internal cavity. Proving a stabilising anchor within the larger circular motion of its cage, these additions hark back to Oliver’s eggs hidden within the spirals of Home of a curling bird, 1988 and Eyrie, 1993. Explicitly referencing the pure mathematical origins of the ring torus, Oliver’s perfectly sized spheres imply the potential for movement around a central axis of rotation – here doubled in a continuous and reciprocal orbital motion like that of planetary bodies.
 
While strong threads of baroque extravagance and curious organic resonance run throughout Bronwyn Oliver’s sculptures, Two rings + two distinguishes itself for its pure, almost platonic, abstraction. Allowing light and air to permeate through the form, its warm, patinated copper surface is a transparent web of straight lines, a meticulous mosaic of triangles and trapezoids evoking the craquelure of glazed ceramics. Joining earlier works like Focus, 2004, Unity, 2001 and Mandala, 2004, the careful balance and philosophical tenor of Two rings + two distantly relates to Buddhist and Shinto symbols and rituals, encountered during the artist’s travels to China and Japan.
 
In August 2006, three works by Bronwyn Oliver were exhibited posthumously within the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award at the National Gallery of Victoria, encapsulating powerful her sculptural legacy: Stroke, 2006; Rose, 2006 (her last work), and the large, fabricated version of Two rings.
 
1. Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver. Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 51
2. ibid., p. 178
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH