Olive Diamond

Olive Diamond was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1998. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Painting and Ceramics. Her work has been exhibited at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA, Sow and Tailor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and featured in publications such as Flaunt Magazine, Tzvetnik, Artsy, and Artnet. The artist is the recipient of the 2021 Florence Leif Award and 2020 Anderson Ranch Fellowship. Diamond currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

In her work, Diamond examines the relationship between history, imaginative reality, and spiritual intervention. Looking to the past while parsing through narratives of real, esoteric, and theoretical history, the figures in her work are unearthed from the landscape themselves as well as the representation of a fleeting memory. In her ceramic works, concocting all of the glaze chemistry by hand, they engage with a type of alchemy that goes hand and hand with its subject. The artist uses material disguise as a means to represent the coded stories of underdogs trying to succeed by assimilation. These coded “tablets of revisionist history” act as a veil to the realities of experience while at the same time preserving the original narrative essence and allowing for new interpretations. Diamond uses both abstract and direct symbols of exodus, migration, wandering, and reaching, iteratively rendered through projections of past and present lives, spiritual and mortal. These narratives are embedded into the natural world and radiate from the land itself. Dissecting the gaps and drawing relationships between disparate visual symbols brings the speculative into a form of document and infiltrates it with distorted lineages. Drawing from animistic and Kabbalistic ideology, everything in the world of Diamond’s work holds spiritual power or the eternal light, even if unperceivable. She fuses together the interior rituals between family of celebration, love, laughter, movement, loss, survival, and the stories of people who do not have anyone or anything to account for them.