Olivia Bernard’s exhibition of sculpture and two-dimensional work spreads out under the sloping roof of The Stoneleigh- Burnham School’s Geissler Gallery. Hanging sheets of white scrim bound the space on one side, separating her work from that of another well-known installation artist, Karen Dolmanisth.

Bernard’s self-curated selections, which span her output of the last 26 years, combine earlier with later works to propose more of a gist than a direct path connecting the lot. Each sculpture demands enough space that, when one is in its presence, the next one hovering nearby does not impinge on one’s sense of being alone with another being. Each piece holds its own, capturing the viewer’s attention and indeed anxiety. As with Giacometti’s figures, one finds that on more intimate approach the works feel larger and more charged.

The abstract work is grounded in cumulative experiences of aging and loss, tempered by an awareness of the sufferings of our times. While Bernard’s immediate audience is adolescent schoolgirls, she addresses all ages in her emphasis on the grounding of awareness and imagination in bodily-based experience.

Despite their sometimes-ungainly Bernard’s forms are deeply human constructions that lead one to engage with internal signals, dialogue and a sense of one’s own existential condition. Many works are built around stiff armatures, using some combination of muslin, cheesecloth, wood, wire, glass and paper that Bernard dips or embeds in Hydrocal, a modifiable type of plaster. Rather than painting her surfaces, she integrates pigments and dyes into her materials’ natural textures, running a gamut from velvet black to gleaming white, with dirty smears of rust or grey and the occasional splash of forgotten blue.

Greenfield, Massachusetts
Geissler Gallery at Stoneleigh-Burnham School

The work of Olivia Bernard, a longtime contributor to the New England and New York art scenes, commands the power to surprise and fascinate. The abstract, human-scale sculptures featured in “Visual Cycles • empty/full • absence/presence,” a two-person show with Karen Dolmanisth (on view through November 18, 2022), exude a compelling aura in the gloom of the shed-like Geissler Gallery. Each piece projects anxiety in the visible effort to maintain equilibrium in relation to gravity—rolling on the floor, balancing on a table, propped against the wall, or suspended from the rafters. A second body of work explores the spatial ambiguities of two-dimensional form with a decided sculptural twist.

Bernard has always been attracted to materials that transform from a fluid to a frozen state—first Hydrocal and Rhoplex; more recently, paper-pulp slurry and molten wax. She pours, casts, or layers these materials over an armature, combining hard and soft materials into an expressive and mysterious result. In her recent two-dimensional work, plate glass (an arrested liquid) becomes a substrate for dimensional materials interacting with the picture plane.

Working by hand with alchemical processes and simple tools, Bernard submits her materials to the bidding of her unconscious and the force of gravity. Immersed in constructing form, she lets instinctual energies take over and guide her in the moment. Something of this altered state is conveyed through the work.

“Visual Cycles” includes seven large, mixed-media and Hydrocal sculptures and six smaller hybrid works that highlight the optical and physical properties of glass sheets. Both bodies of work reveal Bernard’s growing preoccupation over the past two decades with the polarities of darkness/ lightness, gravity/air, and gravitas/transcendence. The most recent works are radiant with clarity, pain, and triumph.

Bernard repeats gestures of wrapping and twisting paper in earlier and more recent works to produce striking spiral-based forms. Untitled (Large Ovoid) (1996) is a paper-bound egg that might imprison a curled-up human. The ribs of Spin (2020–22), a wheeling vortex of soldered steel, are wound in paper strips dripping with stiffened Hydrocal. The spiral also appears in Untethered (2004), an atmospheric, nine-and-a-half-foot drawing studded with whirlwind shapes. It provided a take-off point for several room-size installations—swirling accumulations of airborne curvaceous forms. Billow (2005) more compactly mirrors similar forces in its suspended wave of curled plaster fragments.

From the transitional Untitled (Pillow 3) (1994–2015), a puffy plaster square framing a glass pane, Bernard’s interest in glass took her to the shadowy intersections of flat and dimensional form. Pursuing investigations with handmade paper, paper pulp, glass, and poured wax, she found new possibilities of luminosity and translucence. Seeing Through, from the 2014 “Glass” series, is small glass panel leaning against the wall on a close-fitting steel shelf. A spill of wax covers and cements a string and a sheet of hand-pressed abaca to the panel, leaving exposed many details from the front and back of the picture plane and beyond.

In the current series, “Abhasas,” Bernard lays doubled, unframed glass panes atop delicately crafted steel stands, barely overlapping the edges of the empty upper rectangle. Sandwiched between each pair of panes lies a collage of handmade paper, abaca, thread, and strips of Dura-Lar, held together by gravity. One of these pieces displays a cloudy, fragmented news photo of a bombed-out apartment building in Ukraine.

The pandemic years accelerated a process of inward turning and reflection on aging and loss. They also sent Bernard back to her first love, plaster. From this familiar source, ominous and unstable forms have emerged, including the wraith-like Spin and the all-black Gnarl, an abstracted limb that reaches out from the wall, as if tempting the viewer to grasp its spray of dark, desiccated pods. Pain may never be far from the surface.

Olivia Bernard’s sculpture has always spoken through the fingertips to the whole body. No matter how flat a piece becomes, there’s always another side — and always a sense of inside and outside. It’s tempting to read her small glass panels and attenuated sheets of handmade paper as following within the traditions of abstract or color field painting. But Bernard is neither a painter nor a follower and has no interest in carrying forward the ideological, political or art-historical agenda of abstract painting today. Her 3-D sculpture and installation is grounded in minimalism, feminism and process art. Drawing has always been an extension of her 3-D exploration; she approaches the surface not as a field of visual experimentation but as an exploration of her personal boundaries.

In October, at Smith College’s Brown Fine Arts Center, Bernard will be showing two groups of smaller, relatively flat, wall-mounted work. These employ simple, low-tech materials, as usual, to explore the sensation of translucency. As in her larger sculptures and installations, which have shifted from poured Hydrocal carapaces to handmade paper over wire mesh, the materials in the current works are vitalized in an alchemical transformation from liquid to solid. The “Glass/Wax” series involves a process of dipping glass panes in hot wax, while the “Embedded” series fixes linear structures into stable forms in wet paper pulp.

The materiality of Bernard’s works forces us to reconsider our notions of both “flatness” and “drawing.” Her avoidance of traditional frames forces us to see these forms, in spite of their thinness and rectilinearity, as objects. In the “Glass/Wax” series, the work is not hidden behind glass; the glass pane, which serves as both surface and structure, is itself the work. Leaning against the wall and supported only by a narrow steel flange, each naked pane is at risk from vibration and mishandling. Likewise, Bernard refuses to confine the handmade paper sheets of the “Embedded” series. She floats them over an invisible Plexiglas substrate projecting a few inches off the wall, where they are subject to air currents, gravity, and electrostatic attraction.

On a visceral level, her work captures the dualities of death and life, sorrow and joy, bondage and freedom. …a feeling of subjected consciousness, wavering between the ephemeral dreamlike meanderings of the mind and the physical limitations of reality.

On a visceral level, her work captures the dualities of death and life, sorrow and joy, bondage and freedom. …a feeling of subjected consciousness, wavering between the ephemeral dreamlike meanderings of the mind and the physical limitations of reality.

Bernard inquires into the nature of, and the connections among, all living things, the spiritual component that underscores the life force. This installation inspires both pleasure and anxiety: transitions from light to darkness are as compelling as they are frightening; familiar forms captivate and confuse; its sandy path both guides and troubles us.

Olivia Bernard, a gifted sculptor who divides her time between Northampton and New York, is showing a new installation, through March 17, at the Smith College Museum of Art. Inspired by a hiking trip in the Swiss Alps,‘Essential Forms and Migrations’ is an enigmatic, intriguing work that suggests emotional as well as physical transition. It carries the, visitor through a dimly lit space mapped by architectural plaster and wire divisions, punctuated by abstract objects. Bernard’s mysterious forms conjure nature, as with a large ovoid shape composed of a continuous swathe of white paper knotted around a hidden core, reminiscent of an egg, seed or pod. The work’s blue, black and white palette evokes a frosty mountain environment, with scattered’ pools suggesting the glacier basin.

Curator Michael Komanecky has selected artists currently living in New England whose accomplishments deserve the attention of a wider audience creating an impressive exhibition of primarily large-scale works.  Olivia Bernard Wilson’s powerful sculptures depict violence, grief, and decay. In Keening, wire, wood. rhoplex, cheesecloth, Hydrocal, and pigment are transformed into a post-industrial wraith. The dark, bulky, hollow form appears to be caught, mid-air, in a ritualistic flight of mourning.

Another untitled work [untitled, “Containment II”], constructed of similar materials but filled with sand and straw and hanging heavily on a wooden frame, conjures up a beheaded and disintegrating animal in an abandoned slaughterhouse or gallows. The influence oi Louise Bourgeois is apparent in these sculptures-unattractive but alluring forms exploring messy human conditions and emotions.

“The physicality of sculpture, its potential for extremes of fragility and weight, is a means for examining (complex) experiences.” (Olivia Bernard Wilson)

Wilson’s four monumental pieces suggest hammocks, banners or litters, and her “Burden Bearer” involves ‘sagging billows of torn and pigmented cheesecloth where the layering of the material, the play of gravity, the contrast of the shapeless against the strict angles of the supports, explore the possibilities of complex tactile sensations.

Olivia Wilson has returned to the local scene from three years studying and teaching in Boston. As a result, her sculpture has changed in many ways. Mainly she seems interested in process as ‘much as in imagery.

“I’m always juggling those elements…thinking about how important is the original image I have in my head and how it transforms itself along the way.. .What happens along the way, and how do I incorporate that?” .

She uses plaster as her material, poured into and hardened over cloth. And her persistent theme is the relationship between the object and the support it requires during construction.

Plaster-covered poles suggesting those necessary in the actual transporting of “Transitional Bier” are components of the work. Not only do they recall part of the practical process of working on the piece, they also change the image from a body-like, container form. They imply “more about something being carried or borne.” They connote the process of change and transition.

In a monumental piece titled “Keening,” the armature has a spikey, aggressive quality which is in actual visual tension with the organic volumes of the plaster form. Without doubt the subliminal content here touches on issues of war and grief.

Through her creative procedure, Wilson engages in an internal dialogue in which she muses about social, political and art problems of our time. But paramount at the outset are issues of esthetic form. As Wilson says, “So much of (what happens to me is subconscious… I often set myself a formal problem… How long can I make this and have it still stand up, for instance, and it’s through that structure that the more emotional part comes through. I often don’t know what it really is about until it’s done.”

And the objects have any number of references. They assume all manner of allusions from nature, skin or bodies or landscapes. But first and foremost, the plaster, forms are containers, vessels that interact with space and with the imagination.

Plaster and lathing are fragile and impermanent materials; they suggest human vulnerability as well as mutability. And with the eventual form of the object dependent to some extent on gravity or atmospheric conditions, factors of process, the ambiguous forms imply “forces… beyond our control.”

The stiffened fabric, large scale, and uneasy feel of Olivia Bernard Wilson’s forms bring to mind the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, high praise indeed. Fishnet knotted to an overhead pipe dredges up From the Silence, a sinister dark shape about the size of a body bag. Rest is more or lees coffin shaped, sewn up like a flour bag, with a one-bag bump where we’d expect “head,” and, sure enough, a double-bag arrangement at the other end; all is coated with lumpy ochre colors like mud from a western grave. In the untitled work, fabric furled like a banner is hung from a lodgepole, its bellied folds stiff as if pregnant; deep in this womb, are scraps of straw scattered like a mouse nest, an articulating and effective detail. (Marty Carlock)

An ironic curatorial sensibility places these savage beings next to Olivia Bernard Wilson’s large hay structure. Wilson shares with Wales a view of nature calculated to make one uneasy. In In(e)Volution, this is achieved by making the structure larger than human scale and by placing small, membranous panels of latex into the installation wall. Revealed slowly on one’s journey through the maze, the panels resemble flayed flesh or insect pupae. At one entrance, it is surprising to discover that what one took for a gnaried branch is actually a large snake.

To this viewer, this installation seems more optimistic than Road Ruminant. It is a richly evocative work that casts nature in the role of muse and repository of human memory.