Sculptural body-in-waiting: Olivia Bax:
dolly rolls into 218
Exhibition text
During a sculpture seminar in Unit 2, I was introduced to dolly rolls into 218, an exhibition text by Olivia Bax written for Floss at Holtermann Fine Art. Told from the perspective of a dolly in the artist’s studio, the text reflects on how functional objects such as wheels can activate sculpture through their potential for movement. Bax (2024) references Rebecca Warren’s castor-shod clay works and Antony Caro’s forklift truck, showing how logistics and studio tools shape not only the making but also the language of sculpture. The emphasis is on mobility: how wheels charge objects with the potential of movement, transforming their relation to space.
In Hopper (2020), Bax’s first sculpture on wheels, half a dozen castor wheels are fixed beneath the steel frame. For me, this multiplicity unsettles function and turns the object into a choreography of imagined shifts, rolls, and repositions. The wheels activate the work spatially, producing a perceptual and psychological tension between stasis and potential movement. The sculpture becomes fluid, provisional, and charged with imaginative play.
In my practice, I also use castor wheels beneath collapsible domestic objects (table, seat) that has been burnt and rusted, shifting the object from display stand into a sculptural body-in-waiting. The wheels transform its presence: no longer static, but suspended in the possibility of movement. At once logistical and metaphorical, they symbolise passage and return, a circular continuity between realms, times, and spaces. In this sense, the logic of wheels extends beyond mobility: like breath or memory, they fold the intimate into the cosmic, contemplating home within the rhythms of circular return.
livia Bax, Hopper, 2020. Steel, chicken wire, newspaper, glue, paint, plaster, castor wheels, varnish. 112 x 96 x 96 cm. Standpoint Gallery, London. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
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