Olivia von Pock revels in the wealth of cheap, disposable materials that surround us, using them to make multi-media paintings that reveal the visual power of everyday detritus. Her work is driven by a playful responsiveness to the colour and structural possibilities of found plastics, discarded packaging and pound shop treasures, which she shapes into works that take painting beyond the flat plane.
Broken rubber bands, throbbing with synthetic pigment, are stitched into luxuriant fringes, woven through mesh or bunched and swagged to form a tangled air orchid. Plastic drinking straws are glued into self-supporting structures, collaged to build rippled layers of colour or bristle from painted surfaces like coral formations. Von Pock masses these materials in large quantities until she finds a tipping point where a new quality or effect emerges.
The natural and the artificial collide in works where oddly organic appearances grow from accumulations of synthetic materials. Latex puddles form congealed rock pools, marshmallows float in gungy slicks of paint, and garishly coloured modelling clay oozes brightly coloured growths like toxic confectionery.
Whilst von Pock describes herself as a critical consumer, her work communicates a restless excitement at the inexhaustible visual possibilities of household rubbish and throwaway tat. Alive with surprising textures and discoveries, these works continually resist our perceptions of debased ‘stuff’.
Emma Brooker, on the exhibition „Mutterboden“ at The Stone Space, 2015
Since the passing of a new environmental law in Germany prohibiting, among others, the use of plastic straws after 2021, Olivia von Pock has been buying up remaining stocks in quantity in order to halt the inevitability of the straws rotting in nature.
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