There is a moment, when standing before a work by Mark Ollinger, when the eye stops trying to follow the line and begins to feel it instead. What starts as a simple curve becomes a cascade of bends, folds, and returns, mirroring the emotional loops that shape a life. His practice, rooted in wood, fibres, and intricately constructed forms, invites viewers to consider how consciousness travels through time, building meaning through repetition and renewal. The line, in Ollinger’s hands, becomes language, memory, and sensation at once.
Vancouver audiences have witnessed this unfolding through works that do more than occupy space. Gateway, his 2023 public art project for PC Urban on Ontario Street, created a pause within the city’s movement. Pathways, shown at Patron Fine Art in 2020, drew viewers into its layered surfaces, revealing hidden messages that reward patience and presence. Even earlier, in 2019’s In the Corner of the Carpenters Shop at Cityscape Gallery, his visual language was already gesturing toward the emotional weight of symmetry, rhythm, and coded meaning. Most recently, the 2024 installation on loan at the Vancouver Club encouraged a quieter kind of engagement, inviting members to slow down and interpret the balance within the engineered chaos.
Graffiti was his first teacher in how a single word can carry entire worlds. That influence echoes through the phrases embedded in his sculptures, where language becomes something felt rather than read. His work has resonated far beyond Vancouver, with images published in the New York Times and Cultured Magazine in 2022.
Living and creating in Chemainus, BC, Ollinger continues to refine a practice that blends precision with intuition. His multidimensional works, also exhibited in New York City, ask viewers not only to observe time, but to experience it — folded, intertwined, and alive.