“. . . procedure, process, and play”
Kerrie Oliver’s collection of new works – titled Tippy Toes – springs from an obsession with the act of painting: its physicality, its conceptual parameters, and its flexibility. From her home studio in inner-south Brisbane/Magan-djin, Oliver negotiates the boundless possibilities of non-objective, material exploration alongside the demands of everyday life with two busy teenage sons. Pulsating with sumptuous colours, material experimentation, and traces of impulse (smear it on, wipe it off), the paintings feel effortless, unhurried, almost frozen in time. “When they’re on the wall they seem completely deliberate,” explains Oliver, “but during the process it’s as though they’ve painted themselves.” This statement offers a partial glimpse of Oliver’s drive toward procedure, process, and play, a sentiment that echoes Harold Rosenberg’s mid-twentieth century treatise on action painting: “the act of painting is the object . . . the painting itself is a ghost.”
Kerrie Oliver, Before the Bloom, 2025, oil on linen, 76 × 61.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
For Oliver, the act of painting is guided by desire, and by an interest in the interplay between so-called opposites such as behind/in front, conceal/reveal, beautiful/ugly, congeal/repel, add/subtract, or legible/illegible, for example. Weightless with Intention, 2025, and Before the Bloom, 2025, are possessed of a luminosity that is the product of subtractive smears and smudges (literally removing the paint with a solvent-soaked rag). The residue of this gesture – which registers somewhat like grease left on the mechanic’s rag at the end of a day in the workshop – acts like a visual call and response which generates a productive tension in the surface. At times (as in Held in the Looking, 2025) Oliver seems to toy with techniques that might be considered anti-aesthetic or anti-tradition (thick splodges of paynes grey over burnt umber in the upper righthand corner, for example), the kind of strategic visual awkwardness that might be associated with artists like Albert Oehlen, Charline von Heyl, or Martin Kippenberger. What Opens Without Sound, 2024, features a light pink donut shape swimming across a green umber expanse. This simple composition is overlayed with a veil of thin mesh – tarlatan – a material traditionally used in printmaking to clean or wipe back inked up etching plates (a trace of Oliver’s training as a printmaker). In these, as in other examples, the paintings seem to emerge as a product of a material push and pull, a wrestling, or negotiation of sorts, in which artist and artwork are equal players.
Kerrie Oliver, #6 Down the Tubes, 2025, oil, cotton, linen and ExcelFibre, 29 × 20 × 10cm. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
Throughout the exhibition there are visual references to the body. The sculptural works, comically titled Down the Tubes, 2025, feature recycled oil paintings slashed, sewn, stuffed, and twisted into vaguely anatomical shapes not unlike tangled intestines. Through to the Other Side, 2025, with its small puddles of dried glue hovering over a field of dusty copper tones, reads like beads of sweat pooling on grubby skin. While in Signals from the Edge, 2025, loose crisscrossing lines over faded, mottled pinks recall the roughly scored rind of a rolled roast pork, or flesh bound with ropes. These somatic associations might suggest an interest in sexuality, the abject body, mortality, or physical labour, but for the artist the seductive quality in the paintings derives purely from a sensuous, almost primal engagement with the medium, which is not unlike the pleasure a baby derives from smearing pureed pumpkin across the slick surface of a highchair.
Kerrie Oliver, Through to the Other Side, 2025, oil and glue on linen, 40.5 × 30.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
Kerrie Oliver, Signals from the Edge, 2025, oil on linen, 76 × 61.5cm. Courtesy the artist and Straitjacket, New South Wales
Tippy Toes, the exhibition’s playful title, subtly suggests a process of extending oneself, either literally (as if peeking over a high wall or attempting to reach something just beyond one’s grasp) or metaphorically (as in expanding one’s thinking or imagining future selves, perhaps). Perhaps it also relates to pushing oneself creatively into new and unfamiliar territory, “coming home to abstraction, liberated, fearless, free,” as the artist eloquently put it. Oliver’s frisky use of language also invokes abstraction’s uneasy relationship with words: what Ann Gibson has called Abstract Expressionism’s “evasion of language.” But the use of poetic language in these artwork titles somewhat complicates this historical evasion. Instead of avoiding or evading language, words are confronted, and dialectical slippages are embraced through various kinds of associative wordplay. This open, unrestricted, and playful strategy reflects Oliver’s deeply improvisational approach to making and reveals the importance of relationality in both generating and reading her paintings. Here, borders are loose and unfixed, and there, fleeting (lurking) representational or figurative associations may be unintentional, conditional, partial, and subjective. But this is part of their appeal (and the enduring power of abstraction): they leave space for the viewer to bring their own inexplicable, unruly, and unutterable baggage to the experience of looking.
Sally Molloy is a Magan-djin/Brisbane-based artist, writer, and educator. She works with painting, collage, sculpture, sound, and poetry often challenging the implied hierarchy of media with a strategically naïve aesthetic, crummy materials, and humour. Sally holds a PhD from the Queensland College of Art and Design (Griffith University) where she now teaches Painting.
Straitjacket
13 September to 5 October 2025
New South Wales
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, September 2025 issue, pp. 23–25
