About

My name is Olivia Pratt Wilmerding and I am the founding and featured artist at Tightcliff Studios, Welcome!

 I hold a BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a certificate of classical atelier training in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. During my junior year at the Academy, I had been given a student studio and the impossible task of filling it with original artwork that could compete with my peers. A small white box of a room, I had no ideas and no time to spare. With mounting frustration and panic sweat, I finally grabbed the only material cheap enough to justify wasting: blue painter’s masking tape. I feverishly began tearing off pieces and sticking them directly to the walls, mapping out large female nudes and cascading geometric patterns until my walls were covered. Happy with the results and just as happy to tear them down the moment I grew tired of them, I knew I had found my niche: I was the tape girl. Since graduating, I spent my 20’s teaching art to high schoolers. Starting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, then moving on a whim to a boarding school in rural Utah just before the pandemic. While teaching, I continued to experiment with and refine my voice with tape. After meeting the love of my life in that small Utah town, we decided together to relocate to Spokane Washington. We bought our 20 acre farm from some very colorful doomsday preppers and moved ourselves, 3 dogs, 3 cats, and 3 horses here in May of 2024. Named for the small butte that overlooks our beautiful forest hideaway, Tightcliff Studios marks the beginning of a lifelong dream: to grow and create in a space filled with love, curiosity, nature, and community. Thank you for following our journey!

Artist Statement

I consider the work to be a unique combination of genres that I call American Pop-folk. Using a mass produced industrial material to create labor intensive handmade work feels like an exciting intersection between conceptual art and diligent craft. Because painter’s tape was created to remove visible traces of human error in painting (perfect lines, crisp borders, sharp edges etc), I loved the thought of using it to create imperfect, clunky, chunky, folk representations of plants, animals, politics, womanhood, whatever. I consider my creative voice to be what I call a “joyrage”. I am so desperately in love with life and the world that I can’t bear to be around it at all and truly can’t decide if I am singing or screaming at any given moment. I want to talk about what is happening, I can’t talk about what’s happening, I need people, I can only get along with animals, I’m tired, I’m wired! In the words of Annie Clark: “I’m so glad I came and I can’t wait to leave”. My voice is one of contradictions that can only find some kind of harmony by cutting a million little pieces of tape into whatever idea feels worth exploring at this very moment. I need to experience everything right now and I need to sit in the same spot for seven hours and cut tiny thorns out of tape. This is my curse and my gift.