Olivia Foster

I have always been drawn to exploring themes of a cyclical nature in my practice. This has led me to discover the paradoxical nature of revolution - a term that exists in tension with itself. It simultaneously implies circularity and return or rupture and transformation. This inherent contradiction fuels my investigation into the dichotomy between ‘to revolve’ and ‘to revolt’ - a dialectic that is revealed not only in language and history, but viscerally through the human form. In my work, the body becomes a vessel through which metaphysical, ontological, political and temporal reasoning are both embraced and resisted.

The intertwined coexistence of these two meanings within the same word suggests a deeper existential question: are we bound to repeat, or are we free to change? What would we become if this temporal cycle ceased to exist, and we broke free from its entrapment? What if the perpetual motion finally stopped? In my work, the body becomes the site where this question is made visible. The figures I depict are frozen in swirling motions, entangled with one another and with time itself.

This notion, that contradiction is not inherently dissonant but can instead produce a deeper unity, underpins much of my thinking. The figures that I depict are both trapped and transcendent; they inhabit a space where time folds in on itself, where movement is both perpetual and futile. Yet within this apparent contradiction lies a momentary equilibrium amidst the chaos.

What would it mean to stop this motion? To step outside the cycle? My work poses this question despite he reality of a potentially unattainable answer. Yet I still find myself curious. If the maelstrom ceased, would we be liberated - or would we lose the very force that defines our being? Is it within the motion itself that we find meaning? My compositions capture the moment just before resolution - the frozen instant where possibility still exists, where the body has not yet surrendered fully to gravity or achieved flight.

Ultimately, my work is an exploration of the space between compulsion and liberation, fate and agency, recurrence and of rupture. The human form, in all its fragility and resilience, becomes the vehicle through which these abstract tensions are made visible. It is through the body that I attempt to grapple with the paradox of revolution - not to resolve it, but to inhabit it. In the ever-repeating revolutions of history and being, my work seeks to locate that flickering moment when revolt is possible - when the cycle might stutter, shift, or be reimagined. That moment, suspended in the maelstrom, is where the body speaks: of struggle, of hope, of the eternal return - and perhaps, of something new.