Oliver Jeffers
Oliver Jeffers is a visual artist and author working in painting, bookmaking, illustration, collage, performance and sculpture. Curiosity, perspective, the power of storytelling, and humor are underlying themes throughout Oliver’s practice. While investigating the ways the human mind understands its world, and place within that world, his work also functions as comic relief in the face of futility.
Current directions for his art-making include the imaginary lines across land and imaginary lines in the sky. With the former, Jeffers–with a deep suspicion of Nationalism, Patriotism and Isolationism, born from growing up with the political and national uncertainty of a turbulent Belfast in the 1970s and 80s–picks apart the powerful story of human made borders, of how people treat other people. With the latter, Jeffers uses the construct of star constellations to take a longer lens approach to humanity’s story. With the egotism that was perhaps integral to the success of human civilization, Jeffers art looks at how we often forget our place in a grander cosmos- that the pictures we created for arrangements of stars in a night sky only make sense from this narrow perspective of Earth. But most importantly, given a seeming inability for people to comprehend the singularity of our Planet Earth, Jeffers tries to show, tell, and remind that this is the most urgent story humanity needs to rally around.
