Iris Ollier
Iris Ollier is a multi-disciplinary artist working across sculpture, text and imagery. Her practice investigates embodied perception, specifically the corporeal aspect of looking, and the commodification of attention. Graduating from Newcastle University’s BA Fine Art in 2023, Ollier was awarded Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award grant, (Edinburgh 2025), Newcastle Arts Centre’s Brass Tacks grant from Creative Central NCL (2023), shortlisted for the North East Emerging Artist Award (2024), and in 2022 received the Ella Dawson Travel Award. Solo exhibitions include Iris Ollier at Newcastle Arts Centre (2024-5) Iris Ollier: Roving Eye at Shieldfield Art Works (2023). Other notable exhibitions include In the Round at Newcastle Arts Centre (2023) and Thrills at Embassy Gallery (2024). Iris lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland where she is a director of Votive Gallery, an itinerant artist-run curatorial project.
Renaissance painters imagined the artistic solution to navigating the visible world using linear perspective; representing real space from the viewpoint of a single, static eye. There could not be a less accurate understanding of the mechanics of vision. This attitude is revitalised in the modern day by the ubiquity of photos and, to a lesser extent, videos on screens. We treat photographs as factual although they contain a slight falsehood: we tend to look with two eyes. Vision is predicated by the body's position in space, even as the body itself and the bodies of others enter the visual field. That vision and motion are so extraordinarily enmeshed is a human operation that we give no thought to. We are immersed in the visible by the body, which is itself visible. Or, you kind of always have to look where you’re going.
Updrop is part of a series of ‘lens-works’ which discuss the physical act of looking (at something). Lenses have an inherent novelty value, the lens defying gravity, rendering the world through itself. They bend light in ways we’re not used to. This particular lens is made of water; many liquids have a similar refractive index to glass and can therefore behave like lenses. What if an object could refract space, repel space, bend and shift the peripheral edges around you or bunch it all up close - look different from every angle.
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