This solo exhibition would combine themes of gender, sexuality, and beauty that has inspired my work for many years, as well as the ongoing series of works that focus on the physical body: healing, recovery, proprioception, and the fluctuating physical abilities of the body over time. The exhibition would utilize large and small scale 2D works, sculptural installation, and a new video of a recorded durational performance.
In addition to the imagery of physical bodies and human hands, I plan to expand on the places that humans inhabit, and how our built and natural environments can help us heal through soothing appearance, texture, memory, or by the necessity of our care. For example: House plants on the shelf by my window, the family cat, hand-woven blankets from my family, ceramic planters made by my own hands when my body was able to handle that sort of motion, and food brought to me by loved ones were some of the things that allowed me to rest my mind and body so that both could heal. The work in this proposed exhibition will combine imagery of human made as well as natural environments, and of objects, tools, and symbols of self-care. Like themes of my earlier work that used beauty products which simultaneously present and offer solutions to boundless inadequacies of our physical appearance, this work will aim to contest self-care as a fad or marketing strategy, and instead convey the power of time, space, and community when physically or emotionally recovering.

Olivia Tripp Morrow is a multimedia artist whose work broadly examines gender, sexuality, beauty, and the body. For the last several years, Morrow’s work has been rooted in fiber-based installations that incorporate materials imbued with personal and cultural meaning. In January of 2020, Morrow’s body was surgically augmented to halt a progressive spine disorder, which brought the focus of her practice to the physical body: proprioception, pain, resilience. Her most recent works explore the abilities and limitations of her ‘new’ body through a wide variety of mediums, including embroidery, paint, charcoal, graphite, ceramic sculpture, performance, and video.

Morrow has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions including Body, Joy, Cage, Scar at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (2021), Nine Patch at IA & A at Hillyer (2019) and Gradient at Anacostia Arts Center (2019). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Brentwood Arts Exchange (Brentwood, MD); Dupont Underground (Washington, DC) and The Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton University (Atlantic City, NJ). Morrow’s installations are on permanent loan at the National Institute of Health (Bethesda, MD) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, where she is also an Artist in Residence and Artist Representative on the museum’s Board of Directors. Morrow holds a BFA from Syracuse University; she is based in the metropolitan Washington DC area.