Iris Ollier is an artist based in Scotland working primarily through sculpture. Her practice is grounded in embodied perception and attends to how attention, effort and physical proximity shape experience. The work often unfolds through repetition, durational processes or spatial reorientation, resisting immediacy in favour of sustained and mobile looking.
Rather than representing experience, Ollier’s work sets up conditions that test how bodies orient themselves in space, how meaning accumulates through time and how attention is negotiated under contemporary pressures. Materials are chosen for their physical and perceptual properties, with an emphasis on tactility, contradictions (e.g.: steel, hard/ductile) and the threshold between looked-at and onlooker.
Alongside her studio practice, Ollier is a founding member of Votive Gallery, an itinerant, artist-led exhibition project operating in and around Edinburgh. Votive functions as a practical response to limited infrastructure for emerging artists in the city, prioritising long-form engagement, shared resources and sustained critical exchange over visibility or event-led programming.
Rather than representing experience, Ollier’s work sets up conditions that test how bodies orient themselves in space, how meaning accumulates through time and how attention is negotiated under contemporary pressures. Materials are chosen for their physical and perceptual properties, with an emphasis on tactility, contradictions (e.g.: steel, hard/ductile) and the threshold between looked-at and onlooker.
Alongside her studio practice, Ollier is a founding member of Votive Gallery, an itinerant, artist-led exhibition project operating in and around Edinburgh. Votive functions as a practical response to limited infrastructure for emerging artists in the city, prioritising long-form engagement, shared resources and sustained critical exchange over visibility or event-led programming.