Olivia-Anna Boden (b.2000) is an Edinburgh based artist working in painting, drawing and textiles. Boden graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2022 with a degree in Painting. Her work explores the subjects of femininity, spiritual belief systems, colour, the surreal and the natural world.
Within her practice, Boden reinterprets pre-existing imagery from historical Western paintings with a slight tongue-in-cheek approach. Her artworks are centred around narratives and are maximalist and repetitive in their use of colour and motifs, and she is interested in how the choice of medium can affect the overall representation of the subject matter.
The Heavenly Body series explores the boundary of grotesqueness and beauty that is present in Mediaeval Christian artworks through the use of excess. The artist makes overt reference to specific sources of inspiration, such as Moira Shearer’s ballet performances in The Red Shoes (1948). Subjects from the natural world are repeated throughout the series, depicted in fictitious landscapes, selected for their pre-existing symbolic meanings within historical spiritual belief systems. The female form is a recurring figure throughout the series, ever-present within the dream-like scenes Boden constructs.
