Olivia Twist

0:00 [Applause]

0:07 I'm Olivia Twist I'm an illustrator arts facilitator and educator and I'm from east london I graduate yeah yeah I graduated from lcc in 2015 under royal college in 2017.

0:23 I use drawing to demonstrate worth all of my work acts as an icu you know that kind of colloquial term you know that kind of when you see somebody and you give them the nod that's what my work acts as and serves as for me through illustration I aim to bring about the shock of the familiar and that's when you encounter niche and esoteric things in unexpected places and it's a term I learned like from this local historian called s.a martin I'm somebody that sees beauty in the mundane and I don't believe every story has to be spectacular in order to be documented I love trainers these are some of my faves from 2020 you know when we're in lockdown. And I was buying trainers to preserve mental health as an illustrator I want to capture social history as it's unfolding I want to help fill in missing chapters I want to make it easier for marginalized communities to be able to look back I use drawing as a conversation tool and from my experience it's been the most successful way to stir intergenerational discussion and through my work I want to encourage the taking up of space research is my favorite thing ever as a designer and I take a human-centered approach to it.

1:41 So I'll be collecting eavesdropping deriving all of that I always make effort to become part of the furniture I love oral history the majority of my time is spent talking to people and being on site and participatory design and relational aesthetics are quite important in my practice and with the drawing for me.

2:02 That's not the most important thing I would say that the conversations that come from the drawing are the things I care about most this is what my work was looking like in 2015 so I just talked a little bit about style development and this was kind of like in response to you know like when you're at union you have those portfolio reviews with design professionals and then they come in and give you feedback.

2:24 And then this guy I don't know his name but he's really helped me in it he said to me your work is great but you're a bit like a visual chameleon like I will be changing my style each brief so I kind of took that as a challenge to like find something that is distinctively olivia you know. And I've always been working with like simple materials and I wanted to think like what does feel organic what is free-flowing so this is what I came up with and then sharpie is my material of choice a lot of people feel like my work is a lino cut but as I was saying I like to use like simple tools to make complex marks you know accessible materials I grew up drawing with viral and stuff online paper and for me the thing I love is like the bleed the sharpie gives you I scan in my work.

3:18 And I add color digitally or I work straight on to like found materials jazzy paper all of that and these are some illustrations of my brothers they feature heavily in my work. And I feel like I'm just like documenting their growth the blue pick and the yellow one over there they've been like on billboards around london as well. So it's been actually really nice to like tell them oh come let's go and look at this big picture of you or a big picture of me and you.

3:51 This is some more work I did inspired by them.

3:53 And it was in response to the don't zap the zip which was happening like it was a kind of movement that was happening during lockdown when it was more serious and heavy and the government they were offered like a bailout deal from tfl and one of the things that they were insisting on was suspending free travel for 16 to 18 year olds and we know like how disastrous that would be and for me I was really thinking about how like the oyster card for me really helped me love london know it like the back of my hand feel at home and claim it as yours so after months of campaigning and negotiations it was announced that the oyster and free travel won't be suspended for the kids so these are some of my brother's oyster card picks here's some work that I've done for we transfer I really enjoy like like when you get the commissions and it feels like personal work stuff you would have done anyway and here. I was just really focusing on mark making wanting to show like proper diversity in hairdos and like you know when you go to the barber they have that ring light and the sheen that's on the waves all of that those are some kind of things I was trying to bring about.

5:09 This is some work I did recently with levi's and the rapper eni for her limited edition collection and all of the money from this jacket went to a charity that helps young girls and like gets them into creativity for self-expression.

5:24 So the lyrics on the jacket are from annie's first freestyle then block embroidered then we've got a little bit of illustration inspired by her pink black girls music video as well.

5:39 This is a project that has really shaped my practice and it was an artist's residency I did at carnegie's community youth club and here is where. I really like understood the importance of creating with and not for and while I was a artist in residence here we did loads of workshops so carnes uses boxing and cycling to help young people build confidence self-discipline all of those things.

6:06 So we did some bike customization workshops there were bikes that were donated by the police like you know like stolen bikes that get found I think the police redistributes them to different charities so the kids had really good bikes you can see this guy with a proper nice carrera bike told him don't customize it just keep it fresh like that so with the other kids work they're customizing teaching them liner printing doing like loads of fun bits like that they also have something called connie's come dine with me where there's a lot of youth clubs in battersea so they host like come down with me quarterly and the kids they were like okay olivia we need buntin we need menus we need a board outside all of that so those are the things that we designed together and during the residency I created this mural with them it was 10 minutes long and the thing that the kids really wanted to communicate in the mural is that sense of community so often like we see I guess like what my relationship with at the time I didn't realize it was so like predominantly full of like families and all of these high-rise blocks and things like that.

7:22 So the kids were saying that okay we need to show that togetherness kinship and they had a lot of shared experiences together.

7:31 So we wanted to just allow them to present themselves this is some more work I did with the youth club all of these young boys are now qualified bike mechanics so if your tires bust you can go to them and basically we did them another mural in their bike workshop they've got a kind of community interest thing called bassy bikes and that was really brilliant this is some work I done for sports direct and as I was telling you I like trainers so this was nice it's in their oxford street flagship store this is some work I did for my mate lexa moore she does wrap as well.

8:13 And it's her single and ep cover and the thing that I really enjoyed about.

8:18 This is that I feel like she does what I do with illustration through music. So it's nice to work together on that.

8:27 This is some work I did for a young adult book called the art of protest which is written by d nichols who's a activist and academic in america and the aim of the book is to introduce young readers to past and current protest movements and help them identify meanings behind the associated slogans and symbols so this is spread about the amount for sanitation strike in 1968 we've got vanessa nakate a ugandan climate activist as well so for her like climate change is an abstract and a future thing she has that lived experience and then.

9:10 This is some illustration about the soweto uprising in south africa as well.

9:16 This is some work that is kind of ongoing as well commissioned by the old gallery in birmingham and here I'm looking at that kind of house share life you know and basically I guess this project was commissioned during lockdown so you're really doing house sharing then and proper getting to know the people you live with so through this project I'm touching on platonic intimacy shoddy landlords and temporarily and here there's a little bit of illustration thinking about like conflict resolution like people who don't want to wash dishes had to resort to a little bit of tape what is doing the job.

9:56 And we were also thinking about I guess like building community it takes time isn't it.

10:02 So there was a time where we'd all have like a separate oat milk almond milk all of that in the fridge like having four milks when really and truly only need one milk in it so now we've been moving towards that like having them communal essentials got a little bit of like garden shoes as well and for me personally I'm not someone who's like a garden girl I prefer to be in a balcony so I don't have any garden she's there.

10:29 This is some work I did for the guardian us. And it's about these two nigerian farmers that took on a massive oil company to coup and sued them for pollution and they won and through this project it was really great to learn about like the impacts the pollution has on our ecosystems and like what's it doing to local economies this project also really challenged me. And I really enjoyed it.

10:57 And I built some really great connections and it was working with saint christopher's hospice which is is in sydney and the project was commissioned by the museum of london and the project brought together 10 people who had lost a loved one during the pandemic to share their experiences as a group we had like workshops over a series of months and I led some storytelling ones we had some kind of talking about memory as well. And this is some work that we generated so this is my piece kind of thinking about the memory of my late great aunt and basically as a group we decided that okay how do we document this grief in this kind of time you know so together we decided that you know what we're going to make a series of prints so we made six reserve prints here are two of them and with each of the reserve prints they're inspired by a kind of a communal narrative that we built everybody like shared the experiences we found things that overlap and all of the similarities and then all of the participants have kind of provided like an oral history talking about their time and how it relates to the illustration and at the moment and the risk prints are on show at the hospice's new art center and they're also going to be exhibited at museum of london as they've been acquired and entered their permanent collection. That's me thanks for listening [Applause]