OLIVE DIAMOND

Rehearsals for Living is a poetic response to the world of childhood—to its innocence and imagination as well as the structural conditions through which knowledge and morality are first encountered. Across Diamond’s recent works, dense and dissipating scenes depict children at play alongside fragments of the industrialising world of steam engines, scaffolding, and factories. Dripping, bubbling, and pooling glazes, along with the gestural brushwork of the paintings, contribute to Diamond’s atmospheres of delight and discovery.

Through toys and play activities, children scale down and rehearse the adult world. The exhibition centres on these formative moments, where children begin to model cultural understandings of law, ritual, love, and war. Diamond treats toys as interfaces for human ambition, technological progress, belief systems, and fantasy. Objects such as teddy bears, dominos, and swing sets become exploratory structures that shape perceptions of time, causality, and morality.

Across the exhibition, individual works articulate these ideas through distinct formal strategies. In a composition titled Play Things that recalls early industrial production, three women assemble identical teddy bears, while the space around them fractures into pure colour and gesture. In a vertical ceramic tableau titled Sticks, Rocks, and Building Blocks, a young girl swings between trees as the world below—constructed from building blocks—compresses landscape and architecture into an imaginative axis of daydream suspended beneath her.

Nearby, a grid of ceramic tiles titled Chrome and Tin unfolds as a chromatic gradient anchored by a row of toy icons progressing along its base. The sequence recalls Rudolph Zallinger’s The March of Progress; in Diamond’s version, a young girl assumes the leading position. Subtle variations in glaze, produced through incremental shifts in the proportions of chrome and tin additives, generate a highly ordered abstraction. This measured progression echoes the spatial and temporal instability of Cabaletta, in which a woman in a pale green frock and children move rapidly along a bridge-like structure. Across the exhibition, development, motion, and experimentation emerge as recurring formal and conceptual concerns. This fractured sequencing of figures and space recalls Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, linking the language of movement to broader values of progress and futurist ideals.

Diamond’s experimental studio practice parallels the generative logic that fuels childhood discovery, while echoing the process of invention and industrial transformations pictured throughout the exhibition. Her glazes emerge through trial, chance, and reaction—adjusting compounds, temperatures, and firing conditions to produce surfaces that range from glassy translucence to mineral variegation. Diamond’s work registers a responsiveness to material, foregrounding contingency, variation, and the open-ended logic of play. The exhibition holds scientific and symbolic meaning in tension, balancing rigid structures with fluid surfaces, and calculated systems with a strong sense of playful and aesthetic resonance.

Olive Diamond (b. 1998, Los Angeles, CA) graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2021 with a BFA in Painting and Ceramics. Diamond was awarded the 2021 Florence Leif Award and the 2020 Anderson Ranch Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, Fall River, MA; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; Japanese American Cultural Community Centre, Los Angeles, CA; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, CA; Unit London, London, United Kingdom; South Willard Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and 1969 Gallery, New York, NY. Diamond lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.