AGE: 26
BASED: New York
Olivia Vigo grew up going to 4-H and helping out her beekeeper father in a Northern California agricultural community. She learned to weld at a young age, developing what she describes as a “mentality of doing everything yourself.” It makes sense that she went on to study industrial design and found her passion in utilitarian objects: shelving, storage containers, old car parts.
But Vigo, now 26 and based in Brooklyn, sees these things in both practical and deeply personal terms. Having moved around a lot as a teenager, she’s particularly attuned to the emotional roles that functional objects can play in the home. For example, a dresser, wardrobe, or crate may contain “things that are being saved,” she says. Perhaps they are “things we keep through heartbreak and the history of it.”
In 2021, she made a conceptual turn. The notion of a wardrobe had been preoccupying her thoughts. “You would think of it as a cumbersome wooden piece,” she says, “but I wanted to make it out of what you typically house in there,” like jackets and wool coats. So she met with shepherds and sheared sheep, cleaned the fibers, and ultimately hand-felted an entire wardrobe, which she went on to show at the (now-closed) New York gallery Larrie.
“I feel stuck in this weird design box, where I am thinking about the domestic sphere,”she says. “[But] the things I gravitate toward making are the parts that don’t feel traditionally female ... like the welded, the formed, the rendered, the sterile-type items. But in the end, I always have this drive to add the domestic motif.”
Take a mechanic’s stool that Vigo cast in lace, or a vase she made out of steel, car doorhandles, and Bondo, then painted bubblegum pink. The vase, another kind of container, “is the most ancient domestic item for a multitude of functions,” she says. The question she asked herself while making it is one that’s now central to her practice: How can I add to the redo of this form using materials that wouldn’t typically enter the interior space?
Vigo’s latest work—a series of lamps that vaguely resemble television sets—will appearin a two-person show, with Giangiacomo Rossetti, at American Art Catalogues in mid-December.
