Sculpture · Digital Imagery · Mixed Media
David
Olson
A sculptural practice shaped by discovery—altering, combining, and reassembling imagery, materials, and lived experience into something not made before.
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Featured · New body of work
Dystopian Darkness and LightInner Totems
Digital imagery, layered forms, and fragments of lived experience come together in sculptural constructions exploring memory, transformation, darkness, light, and the continually changing nature of how we see ourselves and the world.
Selected current work
Images become objects.
Fragments become form.
Earlier work · Paper and steel sculpture
Material changes.
The language continues.
01
Paper as sculpture
Cut, folded, joined, and accumulated paper carries gesture into space. Curving lines and pointed forms gather into structures that feel both fragile and insistent.
02
Steel and public space
Earlier monumental works establish the practice’s physical foundation: vertical movement, structural tension, balance, and a direct relationship with architecture and the body.
Artist statement
Darkness and light.
Order and disruption.
Permanence and change.
Over time, my work as a sculptor has moved from metal and wood to paper, and more recently into digital imagery and manipulation. Images of my artwork and surroundings are altered, combined, repeated, and reassembled into collages and three-dimensional constructions.
Fragmented forms conceal and reveal themselves as the viewer moves. The parts remain distinct, yet together they reach toward another kind of wholeness.
A continuing beginning
“At this point in my life, I am increasingly interested in what can happen when I allow what I have already made and experienced to become the beginning of something I have not made before.”
— David Olson
About
Discovery remains the constant.
The making of visual images has been with me from an early age. My formal visual art education began at Bethany College, followed by graduate study at Eastern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University–Carbondale.
The experiences of life continue to be my teacher, as I respond daily to the sculptural journeys begun and completed in my studio.
David Olson