Irene Hardwicke Olivieri

My vagabond heart has led me to live in a variety of habitats; each one finds its way into my artwork. I’m painting about love and relationships, obsessions, and parts of life that are often subterranean. An ongoing theme in my work is rewilding the heart, to inspire deeper connections to wild animals and wild lands. I fall into a trance patterning tiny words over imagery as if inscribing the life of each complex creature into memory or an intense emotional experience into healing.
The layering of images, text, emotions and experiences turns into a painting, which for me is like a laying on of hands. I’m primarily a painter but recently I’ve been making sculpture out of cholla cactus skeletons I collect while hiking in the southwestern wilderness. I like to collect seeds and grow cactus and other native plants. I feel great affection for the plants and animals around me with a special place in my heart for cholla, a cactus that provides food and shelter to a variety of birds and animals and boldly demands its own space in the desert. My cholla creatures also incorporate juniper, ponderosa pine and old rusty metal I find while exploring the landscape.

I grew up in the borderlands of south Texas and Tamaulipas Mexico; my childhood years were spent along the Rio Grande River. I now live upstream near the Rio Grande River Gorge in northern New Mexico. My early experiences in the natural world surrounded by the rich diversity of cultures lit the way for the rest of my life. I love researching the flora and fauna and local ecosystem of wherever I live -from the Amazon River in my teens to a lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Maine. I studied art in central Mexico and sang in an all-girl punk band in Austin before moving to New York for graduate school. I drew neotropical palms and the insects that pollinate them for a botanist at the New York Botanical Gardens and worked in the medieval gardens of The Cloisters. While living off the grid in a solar-powered house in the high desert of Oregon, I became active in protecting mountain lions and wolves and cofounded an organization dedicated to banning animal trapping. While living in Maine I worked at Acadia Wildlife Center rehabilitating wild animals. In Arizona, I connected with the Northern Jaguar Project and continue donating artwork to help save the Sonoran jaguar population. I live in an off-the-grid adobe house on a sagebrush-covered mesa in northern New Mexico near the Rio Grande River Gorge.

2-D, Painting (all materials)