Olivia Nesbitt
https://olivianesbitt.com/Olivia Nesbitt is a multimedia artist born, raised, and based in New York City, with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work explores themes of womanhood, ritual, and tradition through a focus on slow, embodied practices—most notably wet felting, wool processing, and embroidery. The slow, deliberate pace of these traditional techniques creates space for the tactile qualities of the material and repetitive motion to guide the evolution of each piece and allows for contemplation of the ways in which gender has historically shaped craft—and how craft practices, in turn, have shaped ideas about gender. Rooted in sustainability and a desire for deeper connection to her materials, Olivia primarily sources wool from farms across New York State. The fibers—ranging in natural hues from dark, almost-black browns to luminous whites—often carry with them traces of their origins: plant matter, the subtle scent of lanolin, and the occasional insect. In an age of mass production and sterilization, these organic imperfections serve as vital reminders of the living world from which they come. In addition to wool, Olivia also works with glass, human hair, saliva, found objects, and insects. Her current art practice began as a means to find comfort in her body through acts of making. Over time, she has incorporated parts of herself in her work to give the audience a more intimate understanding of the personal and cultural tensions it addresses and to invite uncomfortable, but necessary, conversations.
My work is slow, and it is routine; one could even classify it as analog. I am drawn to water felting, wool processing, and embroidery for all the same reasons—the level of tactility each practice affords. I need to feel my materials, each stitch and each fiber, to understand where the work will go. Repetition allows me to think beyond and before what I am making. Such simplicity is profound and beautiful; just look at the range of colors a sheep’s natural fleece can come in. In sourcing my materials, I try to stay local. Much of my wool comes from sheep that I have helped raise on Dashing Star Farm. What I cannot source from there, I find at farms of friends or small businesses in the Hudson Valley. When I am lucky, small bugs and detritus of interest are locked into the fleeces I acquire. In this way, I feel closer to the natural world and can approach my work from a place of deep, organic healing. My art practice is ever-evolving—the way I physically manifest my inner world always taking on vastly different forms. Yet my work remains grounded in the same impulse: to share narratives of intimate experiences within the feminized body. This is how I reckon with what it means to be a woman. As of late, human hair—my own and that of others—has become an important part of my work, down to the ritual of collecting my shed hair after a shower, counting each strand, and taping it to my wall. Human hair is ripe with magical potential, fueled by rituals of care, which I hope to harness in my work.
