Dear Olivia. Solo exhibition including 42 works comprising of letters, sculpture, installation, mapping, drawing, and video projections
- Submitting institution
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University of Wales Trinity Saint David / Prifysgol Cymru Y Drindod Dewi Sant
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32-CWD1
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2015
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
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- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
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- Additional information
- The issues that Wood explores throughout the exhibition Dear Olivia… include the definitions and categories of scale, difficulties in communication, climate change, the complex matrix of interconnectivity between the micro and the macro, the banal and the profound and the local and the global. Wood’s processes were initially instigated by the chance discovery of a letter-in-a-bottle on a beach in South Wales, written by a six-year-old girl called Olivia. His subsequent ‘reply’, using a return message in a bottle, was initially a private performative act, but led to a major body of academic research and creative output. In addition, Wood examines the importance and degree of chance available within creative processes and the possibilities offered through the spectrum of collaborative modes e.g. with the unknown Olivia. Wood’s simple act of ‘sending’ a reply letter generated a complex and ongoing enquiry into the challenges of communication; from the psychology of personal interactions through to the difficulties, on a global scale, of accurate connectivity both technologically and culturally. In addition, anecdotes into local sea currents expanded into global oceanic research into climate change and the ‘mapping of the future’ New Maps Series. The Dear Olivia… exhibition realises the possibilities afforded by extrapolation from the humblest of details. Wood’s outputs utilise a multitude of media and frequently reference local folk and craft techniques such as letter writing, bead making, cut outs, colouring in etc. Such humble materials, scale and methods form a powerful juxtaposition with the enormity, profundity and immediacy of these global issues. Dissemination: I. Dear Olivia… Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, Wales. 7 March - 13 May 2015. Group exhibition, There is a Space in Politics and a Politics in Space, GS Artists, Swansea, 2019, featuring Empire. III. Group exhibition, Twelve Years in the Making, Galeria Cadaqués, Cadaqués, Spain, 2019.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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