Irene Hardwicke Olivieri grew up in south Texas at the mouth of the Rio Grande. After a peripatetic lifetime of living everywhere from Central America to an off-grid home in Oregon to a lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Maine, she has settled in Santa Fe, in the Rio Grande Rift between the volcanic Jemez Mountains and the tectonic Sangre de Cristos. The valley and the mountains are full of the flora and fauna that have fascinated her since she was a child.

“Other than New York,” she says, “This is the first time I’ve lived in a town. We’d been living way out and I miss seeing wild animals in the back yard like bobcats and bears. She and her husband have favorite mountain trails and collect rocks, bones and plants on their hikes. They have even set up a trail cam with a motion sensor in a remote canyon in the mountains to observe the animals that visit its tiny spring. “You get to see who’s wandering unseen,” she observes. “The little spring of water is only the size of a plate but it’s a magnate for everything. They love it and so do we.”

When I first moved to Santa Fe 17 years ago, I went on hikes in both mountain ranges with Roshi Joan Halifax and folks from Upaya Zen Center. Naturalists in the group would point out things I, for one, didn’t see, including deer and coyote scat—their droppings along the trail. The only interest I had had in such things in the past had been avoiding cow flaps when we ran barefoot through the pastures on the New Hampshire farm where we vacationed each July. Identifying the scat on the trails and its age, is a helpful guide to who is sharing the environment with you.

When she was living in Oregon, looking and seeing as she hiked, Irene found several owl pellets, the coughed up, undigested bones, teeth and fur of the owl’s last meal. She relates, “One day we were at this incredible place called Fort Rock. There are giant cliffs and at the bottom of one there were all these owl pellets, hundreds of them. I was so excited. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what I was going to do with them, but I had a backpack and I started to fill it. My husband said, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I don't know, but I need them for something.’”

She explains, “It's all out there just waiting for us. It's like this incredible world of everything and anything that you want to learn about, be it a plant or an animal like a gila monster that you see for the first time. I like to read about it as much as I can and it just opens up a whole world of interest for me."

Back home, after collecting the owl pellets, she tried soaking them in water—which made a mess. In her research, she learned that she should sterilize the pellets by baking them in the oven at 300 degrees. After that, and airing out the house from the smell, she began dissecting them, sorting out the ribs, jaws and other bones with tweezers.

The bones have found their way into complex yet subtle compositions that appear from afar to be like sgraffito or the scratchboards we all made as kids.

One of those pieces, Encantada (Spanish for enchanted) will be shown at Evoke in her exhibition, Honey in the Desert, that opens August 30. Irene explains, “I thought I really want to make alluring figures out of the bones. So, from a distance you would think ‘Ah, there’s a very alluring woman.’ But she’s really made out of bones.”

Encantada is composed on a round copper tray. “I’ve had that tray for years,” she explains. “I think I got it at some antique store or junk store. I collect all kinds of stuff. I like round things and I wanted the piece to be very graceful and beautiful. I also thought I needed something that would be protective around the edges.”

When she was working on the figure, she came upon a recently deceased porcupine. “There was no blood and it was clean,” she explains. As she went through the arduous task of removing its quills, she did her research. She discovered “They have 30,000 quills with long soft quills on their underbelly. They have different shaped quills and different coloring. The quills are a pale creamy color and then they’re dark brown at the tip so you have these beautiful variations. It’s just so exciting. I thought, ‘I can make shadows with these. I can put them in with the bone pieces and I can make things so the dead porcupine can live on in my art.’”

The bones and quills are adhered to the copper tray with a special glue called PaleoBOND. “I love it,” she says. “It’s what paleontologists use on fossils.” The early reception of her bone pieces (which are only part of her output that includes complex paintings and assemblages) wasn’t always positive. “You know, most people don’t want to think about an owl coughing up something. Or, sometimes, they think it’s droppings. It’s not, but it turns people off. I feel people miss out on learning about something that’s really interesting and amazing.”

Exploring her house and gardens rising up in levels past a greenhouse to a guest casita at the top of a rise, everything is “interesting and amazing”. Sitting on the porch of the casita—which she is now using as her studio—I gazed into the tops of dried agave spikes. The sometimes 30-foot spikes with yellow blossoms are stunning in gardens and in the desert. These, however, were the beautiful, brown, expired spikes which she had seen in other people’s gardens, asked the owners to save them, and then strapped them on the top of her Jeep to take home.

Looking and seeing has the added element of conserving for Irene. Dead things come alive in her work. “I never have a lack of ideas,” she says. “I have a whole lot of things I want to do. I can’t wait to get to my studio. Some days I get so excited I feel like I’m just going to take off and fly. Literally. It’s a good feeling.”

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