Meet Oliver Lyric

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Oliver Lyric. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Oliver , appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

A lot of my creativity and drive to create comes from my lived experience and what is happening in the world around me. The way I keep my creativity alive in terms of pulling from my experience is by reflecting. I reflect on experiences frequently either through writing or drawing and this is where most of my ideas for creating come from. I think reflecting on yourself and your lived experience is the way to pull the most raw ideas and creative spirit from yourself. I often will think about one experience for days on end thinking about it from every angle until I’ve pulled the biggest emotions or questions from it that I can and those are the things that fuel what I make.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am a visual artist and film maker making work primarily about being transgender and the different facets of my experience as a trans person. I primarily make soft sculpture and fiber work utilizing visible mending techniques and Japanese mending techniques to express ideas of forging your own identity through the use of scrap material. I also teach classes on hand sewing, book making, and other art skills at Spare Parts in San Antonio, so check out their website https://www.spsatx.org to find my classes!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I think the 3 qualities that have impacted my journey the most are my work-ethic, my natural curiosity, and my empathy for others. My work ethic has allowed me to continue creating even when my ideas seem to big for my time constraints and has allowed me to grow my skills more and more as I create. My curiosity has made me look into different avenues of creating that I would never have considered at the beginning of my art career. For a long time I thought I would be a painter as that was what came the most naturally to me. After learning about the massive amounts of fabric and material waste that we create throughout our lives I started looking into sustainable solutions to the issues of fast fashion and the amount of waste created by these industries. This led me to visible mending and Japanese mending specifically which continues to inform the work I make and the ways I create continues to change as I learn more. Being empathetic towards others has also informed the work I make especially recently as I’ve been very invested in making work that memorializes trans people who have died or been killed because of transphobia. Wanting to understand others is just as big of a drive for my work as my want to understand myself. My advice for people early in their artistic career is to follow the leads that are given to you. If there is something that is on your mind frequently or something you’ve seen that you have a lot of questions about, follow that trail you WILL find something that puts your creativity into overdrive you just have to follow the leads that come your way.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

I think being well rounded as an artist is very important. At least having a variety of mediums to pull from is super important in my opinion. I think being able to work in multiple mediums or having multiple skills is how you create new and interesting things. As someone who loves to combine my mediums of interest as much as possible having different mediums you can work in gives you more avenues to explore when creating. I think having multiple skills also allows you to think about the different ways an artwork can look depending on the mediums or skills you want to incorporate and it allows you to consider what the medium you are using says about the work you want to create. Like what does this work being a painting say versus what it says if the work is a sculpture or video piece? What does using fabric say versus using ceramic? What does it say when I combine these things? I think that is how you get to the most interesting work. My last two years of college I was very invested in combining my growing love for fiber work with the other work I had been creating. I tried combining fiber with my ceramic work and really enjoyed the contrast between the softness of the fabric and string with the hardness and smoothness of the ceramic. I combined my bookmaking work with fiber and liked the idea of juxtaposing the fragility of paper with the malleability of fabric. There is a lot more to explore when you have different skills and experience than if you can only do one thing.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @awlivr