Olive Burgess
Can you Hear the Talking?
Can you hear the talking? is the culmination of autobiographical research from Burgess' visits to places of familial lineage in Ireland. The collection spans materials across image and sculpture, and is centred around photoetchings made from microscopic images of the artist’s body, moss, and stone—materials collected and collated over the course of five years. The artwork unfolds as a living map—a layered dialogue between past and present, landscape and reflection, material and memory, revealing the complex interplay between personal history and the physical world due to ecological time.
Can you hear the talking? takes place between Dublin to Spiddal, with Galway, Wicklow, Limerick and Ballyvaughan along the way. Conversations with particular landscapes and geographic bodies / histories, family, friends, and a chance encounter with Billy Dillon, the son of the groundsman of Burgess’ ancestral family home, calcified this research. This body of work explores the porous relationship between the human body and that of the landscape—both clarified and muddied by a complex family history and its presence in the places, waterways and rockfaces now resituated by Burgess’ visits. Can you hear the talking? is an investigation as to how matter and memory are ever-entwined.
Olive Burgess is a multidisciplinary artist working across printmaking, photography, moving image, sculpture and sound. Her work connects seemingly disparate things in order to draw the mind to connections which western systems dismantle and deny. A research-based practitioner, she explores themes of self, the weather, and place within broader physical and societal contexts—leaning specifically on feminist and postcolonial landscape theory. Her work engages with place and the body as interconnected ways of knowing the self.
In 2025, Burgess underwent a residency in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, supported by the awarded SCA Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship and completed the Graduate Residency at Megalo Print studio, in Canberra.
She holds a BVA with Honours from Sydney College of the Arts.
Website - oliveburgess.cargo.site