Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents Double Take by Olivia Bax, a vibrant exhibition bringing together 20 new and recent sculptures that revel in the joy of the familiar and the invented.

Double Take celebrates Bax’s distinctive combining of materials, colour and construction techniques to reveal new relationships between objects, spaces and the ways we experience them. The title reflects the artist’s use of multiple perspectives in an exhibition that invites moments of pause and reconsideration.

Bax uses welded frames, metal mesh and highly coloured paper pulp forms to create dynamic sculptures that shift between solidity and openness. Transparency plays a significant role in her current investigations. A fascination with windows and apertures focuses on how they frame passing moments and shape our perceptions. She says: “Windows are portals, they provide potential for new and unexpected horizons". Snapshots and memories from her everyday life are transformed into intriguing works: an aerial view during a bus journey, the wooden shutters of her childhood bedroom or supermarket shopping with a child sitting in the trolley.

This approach extends into the gallery where Bax creates layered and shifting views through and between works. One wall houses a series of newly constructed screens that project into the space. The hinged and angular forms create a multitude of vantage points through which the other sculptures can be seen. Referencing architectural screens intended to divide, enclose or define spaces, these objects are liberated from their practical purpose and instead become devices for seeing, framing and connecting.

A centrepiece in the gallery is a ramp structure, inspired by the artist's own bus-top views of a London BMX park. Together with two smaller ramps placed against the walls, this functions as a plinth whilst also being integrated into architecture of the building. Feeding into Bax's interest in the potential of movement, Ice Breaker is seemingly perilously balanced on its casters atop a ramp. She often attaches wheels to her sculptures to give the sense that they could move, countering the convention of a gallery environment where objects are fixed and immobile. The relationship between sculpture and platform challenges established distinctions between the artwork, its display and the building that houses it.

Colour is intrinsic to Bax's practice. Rather than being added to the surface, it forms an essential part of the making process itself. She uses salvaged domestic paints diverted from landfill and incorporated directly into dense paper pulp mixtures. Selected from paints that are available, the bright colour palette exaggerates the playfulness of the forms. Intrigued by revealing internal structures, she often cuts through sections to open views that were once concealed. Through this process Bax also reveals the integral and energetic nature of colour within the work.

Salvaging and reusing materials has always been an important part of the artist’s practice, in part due to affordability, but it also leans into ideas of renewal and reframing. Pulp made from recycled paper and reclaimed or discontinued paints offered Bax an accessible starting point to develop her sculptural language. Incorporated within the sculptures are discarded objects including musical instruments, wheels, kitchenware and shopping trollies. Removed from their intended context and usefulness, the obsolete objects exist in an incongruous union with the abstract forms.

Bax often reimagines previous pieces by dismantling and reworking elements to experiment with composition, taking in the joy of purloining familiar forms. This transformative process is partly driven by a need to be economical with her limited studio space and materials but also subverts longstanding ideals of sculpture permanence. Great Catch (2024), shown at Roche Court Sculpture Park in 2024, was subsequently dismantled, with parts becoming the basis for Ice Breaker, All Ears and Another Great Catch. Each new work develops its own identity. All Ears brings in musical instruments and sections of a cast beach ball that call to mind the now obsolete ‘Listening Ears’ once used to detect enemy aircraft on the Kent coast.

In Poche – the French word for pocket – a dismantled shopping trolley holds pulp tubes and hybridised found objects in Bax’s signature vivid colours – orange, yellow, green and pink. She considers pockets as in-between spaces that cross the boundary of our public and private worlds. Dyad encases a sculpture called Van’s View which takes inspiration from Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) (1889) which includes a window with green shutters. Bax recreated the shutters in different scales and extended the form beyond the window to imagine the surrounding architecture.

Olivia Bax says: “I am delighted to be showing at YSP, a place that I have visited many times. I am especially interested to see my work in The Weston Gallery – a space which feels like it has been carved and spliced into the banks of the landscape. It mirrors the way I have worked on many of the sculptures for Double Take.”

Notes to Editors 
Press enquiries
YSP / +44 (0)1924 832 631 / comms@ysp.org.uk  
Download images at ysp.org.uk/press

Listings information
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG
Near Wakefield and Barnsley – M1 Junction 38
+44 (0)1924 832631 | ysp.org.uk | @YSPsculpture
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