Olivia Sterling

My current body of work focuses on paintings of domestic scenes that mimic how I perceived living in Britain as a black person. 

Lately, these paintings contained body parts, domestic objects, British desserts and creams interacting with one another to parallel certain modes of marginalisation and alienation. The paintings are often placed in the bathroom, kitchen or playground as they ranged from the private to public areas. I chose these as they were apt settings for moments of transformation of any kind - raw to cooked, dirty to clean, cool to burnt etc. which can parallel moments of othering. 

I create scenes of hands gesturing amongst others, silently communicating, as well as playing with objects of cream, suspended in a web of letters denoting their skin colour. Often a white hand will be accompanied by ‘p’ for pink or peach interrupting the superiority that oozes from ‘white’, be reminding us of its true, sillier colour. My aim for the paintings are that they are a place where absurdity and normality collide.