The first animal that Irene Hardwicke Olivieri incorporated in her work was a walking stick, found when she was an undergrad in Texas. “They’re pretty amazing,” she says. “They have a record copulating time among insects of 72 hours, and they’re capable of parthenogenesis.” She kept it in a terrarium for a while, reading everything she could about the species, and when it died she put it in an artwork, under glass with a text about walking sticks painted on it. Then she started to raise praying mantises. “I wanted to see if the female really eats the male.” (It does.)
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Now she regularly interweaves images of humans, animals, and plants in paintings that also include obsessively detailed texts. In Valentine for a Cougar–one of 12 paintings at Carl Hammer, most of them on found wood–she’s the valentine, resting peacefully, nude, in the belly of one of these creatures. When she moved to the Oregon high desert two years ago, she started noticing cougar tracks. “I measured every little paw pad, and found this area where they scratch on trees and another where they pee, marking their territory.” She’s read a helpful book called Don’t Get Eaten and has no intention of being killed, but she says she’d “rather die getting taken down by a cougar than in a hospital surrounded by doctors. If I’m still alive when I’m 100, I’m going to do a lot of hiking in cougar country.”
