Lily Oliver, ‘Ollie’,  born and raised in coastal Maine, works primarily in photography, creative writing, and bookmaking. Exploring intimacy, identity, and navigating the body as site, her work often presents severity and softness in equal measure.

Ollie graduated from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in 2021, with a BFA in studio art.  Since then, she has begun her career in librarianship and in 2022, published their debut chapbook Body, Memory House (Gingerbug Press). Currently, she is an Iowa Arts Fellow, MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and MA candidate at the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science. Ollie works out of Iowa City, seeking large bodies of water whenever possible and spoiling her cat, Smudge.

Within my work, the use of self-portraiture complicates the photograph's position as ‘the truth,’ questioning the reliability of personal narrative and ownership of the self. Utilizing the relationship between diaristic text and image-making to document the re-performance of memory— at once revealing and concealing, all flows from the thesis of my work, body as memory house. My attraction to text, image, and artist books comes from a place of control over their consumption— a distinct power in orchestrating time and pace to provoke reaction, a photo is either an epilogue or establishing shot. Neither medium is consistently the origin of the other, they flop and meld and sometimes I find I can write a paragraph better with a camera.