Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performance, Installation
Website: oliviaronan.com
Olivia Ronan is a Canadian-born artist who grew up moving throughout the United States. Her nomadic upbringing shaped a deep relationship with ecology — specifically with plants — as a means of finding belonging and continuity across changing landscapes. She earned a BFA in Studio Art from UC Santa Cruz in 2019 and is now based in the Bay Area, exhibiting frequently in Oakland, San Francisco, and Vallejo.
Ronan’s practice is rooted in the question of how human bodies and plant life coexist, conflict, and transform one another over time. She investigates what she calls “the transience and rootedness of our interwoven life cycles,” working with natural materials — roots, rust, soil, seeds, sticks — and allowing their physical disintegration to become part of the work itself. Her performances unfold across sites and are often captured with a camera placed directly on the ground, yielding spontaneous, earth-level documentation of intimate encounters with the landscape.
She has been an artist in residence at the Winslow House Project in Vallejo (2023 and 2025, most recently as Gardener in Residence), The Sable Project in Vermont (2022), and the San Jose Museum of Quilt & Textiles (2022), among others. She is a recipient of the Arts Council Santa Cruz County Cultivate Grant (2022–2023).
Ronan works across performance, site-based installation, and ecological sculpture, drawing on the materials of the land she inhabits. Her process is slow, attentive, and durational — she has described her work as exploring the tensions and dichotomies between permanence and change, and between the ways people and plants mutually shape one another. Rooted in ecological thinking and land-based art traditions, her work carries a meditative quality: it asks viewers to attend to the precarious, non-human timescales of decomposition, growth, and weathering.
Her series and projects — “picking up sticks,” “subversive topiary,” “night soil seance,” “land(s)caper” — suggest an ongoing, playful, and rigorous investigation into human-plant relationships that resists easy categories. The work has been presented in galleries, outdoor public sites, and alternative spaces throughout the Bay Area and Northern California.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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