Oliver Offord
26 April - 3 May 2025
Bolding Marylebone
A thin cloud cuts across the moon as a knife slices the eye of Simone Mareuil in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.1 The visceral act of cutting the eye open functions as a corporeal access point into the psychologically charged world within. Oliver Offord’s works in ‘Vitreous Body’ take the cross-section of an eye as the arena within which motifs from medical textbooks, natural science and mythical stories germinate and transform. The works visualise a network of intertwined narratives situated in the shimmering intersection between magic and science.
Vitreous body is the name given to the clear fluid that makes up the centre and majority of the eye; light focused by the cornea, iris and lens travels through this fluid before reaching the photoreceptor cells on the retina. In these works eyes are anything but clear; obscured by tools and plant tendrils that trail across the innards, flourishing and in some instances spilling over the confines of the eye’s exterior wall. Staircases descend from the lens; cell diagrams and nascent forms push at the edges of the eye. In this sense the works become a collision between the clinical detachment of anatomical study and the emotional and shadowy landscape of the psyche.
There is a toying with visual perception through the use of lenses embedded in the frame in Whorl. We are made to feel aware of the mechanics of seeing; the pictures look back at us. The perceiving body registers the perceived world. Likewise, the flecks of paint on the glass surface mimic floating specks that drift across our field of vision—clumps of cells ambling about in the vitreous body suspended between the eye’s lens and the retina. These interventions are embedded within the viewing experience, heightening our awareness of ubiquitous yet often overlooked biological phenomena. This making-conscious of ourselves in relation to the world around us touches on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s statement:
‘…My body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are encrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. These reversals, these antinomies, are different ways of saying that vision is caught or comes to be in things...’2
In Jacob’s Dream, a swirling whirlpool of glooping viscid eye liquid eddies into an empty spiral staircase. The piece references the story of Jacob’s ladder, a theophany3 in which Jacob dreams of a ladder, with angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth. In Oliver’s work the language of the diagram is employed and reorganised to portray the otherworldly- a transcendence takes place be it scientific, mythical or written into symbiotic earthly phenomena.
1 Un Chien Andalou. Directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. France: Les Grands Films Classiques, 1929.
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Northwestern Press, 1964), 163.
3 Theophany- A visible manifestation of God or a god.
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Oliver Offord (b.1997, Gloucestershire, UK) completed his BA at Wimbledon College of Arts in 2019, before receiving his post-graduate diploma at The Royal Drawing School in 2021. Recent exhibitions include: ‘The 12th House’ at The White Ermine, Düsseldorf (2025); ‘Farce’ at Farce Gallery, London (2025); ‘Illuminations’ at Set Lewisham, London (2024); and ‘Placed’ at Rattle and Brash, Stroud (2024). His work is held by the UAL and Royal Collection. He lives and works in London.
Offord’s work visualises a network of intertwined narratives stemming from natural sciences, psychology, mythology and social history. He is particularly interested in the ways in which nature is able to adapt and transform in a rapidly changing world, and how threat, symbiogenesis, scarcity and desire can act as creative impulses. His work is led by the deconstruction and reorganisation of materials from science textbooks in order to create new collisions between subject areas; in doing so he opens up a transformative space that sits between science and magic, nature and fantasy, and meaning and ambiguity.