Olivia Gates, Glass tool for print making 5 (Banksia), 2026. Image courtsey of the artist.
Olivia Gates
Gallery 2
Opening Thursday 24 September, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 25 September - Sunday 18 October
Olivia Gates was the M16 Artspace 2025/2026 Environmental Artist in Residence. In 2025 she attended a watercolour monotype workshop at Megalo Print Studio led by Annika Romeyn. This process, new to her practice, inspired a second iteration of glass tool making. Following on from Gates’s tools for listening / listening shell series she used her residency at M16 to create glass tools that could be brought out into the landscape to be painted and printed in place. Sculpting glass rollers from wax, Gates casts recycled CRT Television screens to create a surface and weight appropriate for watercolour monotype printing.
In Imagining here from elsewhere, Gates uses her glass printing tools to produce imagery drawn both observationally and from memory. These recurring motifs form a reservoir of visual language through which the artist shares lived and imagined narratives set between her two homes. Gates embraces uncertainty in the balance of hopeful contentment, searching, unfulfilled timelines, transience and permanence while continuously existing between places.
Olivia Gates is an emerging artist whose practice exists between Ngunnawal / Ngunawal / Ngambri Country and Dharawal Country. Formally trained in glass making practices at the Australian National University of School of Art and Design, Gates explores generational memory, personal belonging, environmental conservation and reflects on the ongoing impacts of her lineage on Country.
Learn More About Gates:
Olivia Gates is an artist working and living between Ngunawal / Ngambri Country (Canberra) and her hometown on Dharawal Country. Working primarily with glass, Gates’ work reflects spiralling internal dialogues around the contrasting impacts of her convict/settler lineage, both in generational connection to - and ongoing destructive colonial claims on place. She makes works that gently hold space for listening, with intention to open respectful dialogues of shared experience and revised histories.
Gates graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) / Bachelor of Design from the Australian National University in 2021. She has exhibited both locally and internationally and has acquired prizes recognising her work such as the Boronia Prize for excellence in glass, the Corning Museum of Glass / Australian National University School of Art and Design Partner Scholarship, and the Nigel Thomson Travel Grant.