Biography
Working primarily in what was once called sculpture, Oliver Palmer builds site-specific and process-driven pieces in- and outdoors. His subjects of inquiry include positive and negative space, binary systems of logic, acts of making and un-making, reversible processes, architecture and archaeology.
Using the ancient building material of earth he had previously been using wooden shutters for building rammed-earth blocks but now also uses the gallery space itself as the shutters from which to cast his work.
In using the gallery space to cast his work, and in concentrating on its corners and edges, he doubles and inverts those parts of the architecture which demarcate the gallery’s dominion. The ephemeral materials he uses both contrast with the building's 'permanent' structure and foreshadow its eventual (albeit much later) collapse or demolition. These almost fatalistic works sit at the point between the rational and the chaotic impulses.
Influences on him include Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mike Nelson, Fred Sandback, J. G. Ballard, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Nishida Kitaro, and Jean Baudrillard.
