Bronwyn Joy Oliver (née Gooda, 22 February 1959 – 10 July 2006) was an Australian sculptor whose work primarily consisted of metalwork.

Aged just eight, Oliver attended weekend art classes in Inverell run by Ian Howard, who went on to become dean of the college in Sydney where she would later study.

[12] In her early twenties, Bronwyn Gooda married Leslie Oliver, taking his surname and later retaining it "despite a distressing divorce".

[18] It comprises two large feather-shaped forms suspended above the pedestrian precinct, representing "Queen Street's history of parades as well as the mall's connection between earth and sky".

[23] In August 2002 she was one of five artists shortlisted by the Australian Government for a project to produce a public artwork celebrating the centenary of women's suffrage in Australia.

[9][28] Taking twelve months to create and requiring a budget of up to half million dollars,[notes 2] the work was completed in 2005.

However, Oliver was represented in numerous international group shows, including five during the period 1983 to 1984, around the time she completed her master's degree in London.

Later group shows of which Oliver was part included 'Prospect '93' at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, 'Systems End: Contemporary Art in Australia', which exhibited in several east Asian galleries in 1996, and the Beijing International Biennale in 2003.

[3][19][34] All 25 works included in the 1995 publication, Bronwyn Oliver: mnemonic chords, were made in copper, though a handful also utilised other materials such as bronze, lead or, in one case, fibreglass.

Fink observed that "[f]rom the beginning, Oliver has been interested in things that are made from the inside out, and her works often give cryptic evidence of their manufacture".

[27] For large works she created maquettes (or models), sometimes in plasticine, on other occasions using copper wire or, in the case of her 2002 sculpture Globe, wood and metal.

Her work is on a low bench constructed of timber covered with fireproof bricks...The tiny jeweller's blowtorch is in her right hand, the big bottles of oxygen and acetylene standing behind her.

Hannah Fink, like art critic John McDonald, noted that there is a pattern to the shapes and structures in Oliver's work.

Fink described this as "a consistent vocabulary of elemental forms – the spiral, meander, loop and sphere – in a repertoire of signature archetypes".

[45] Nevertheless, critics have identified the lifelike qualities of early pieces that resembled shells, claws or tails,[32] or noted the apparent similarities to biological forms.

[46] McDonald commented that "For Oliver to deny nature is akin to Balthus saying there is nothing erotic about his paintings or Rothko claiming his works aren't abstract.

"[43] Both major reviews of Oliver's work published in her lifetime (Fenner's 1995 essay and Fink's 2002 journal article) draw attention to dualism and contradiction in the sculptures: Fenner describes them as "delicate and ephemeral, [yet] structurally robust and durable"; Fink sees them as "ethereal but solid, fluid yet rigid, open but closed".

A writer reviewing Vine in the Sydney Hilton admired how it "curls like a fairy tale beanstalk up towards the ceiling as though empowered by the sunlight streaming in from a large open space adjacent".

[49] Journalist Catherine Keenan's 2005 description of how the towering sculpture demonstrated both aesthetic and production values are typical of comments about Oliver's work: It has the delicate, adamantine beauty that characterises many of her pieces, but is also an engineering marvel: 380 kilograms of metal that was delivered on the back of an oversized truck and now hangs from a single specially manufactured rod fixed to the ceiling.

[4] He later elaborated: It is a cliche that every artist keeps making the same work, but in Oliver's case, while some forms resemble sea creatures and others the buds of plants, the family ties between even the most diverse pieces are very strong ... nothing was dashed off or thrown together.

Every piece feels as if it has been minutely considered, with each strand of copper wire being brazed into exactly the right spot ... All the things that have recently been said about Oliver – that she was beautiful, intelligent, charming – could also be said about the work.

[34] Hannah Fink, reflecting on Oliver's last sculptures, wrote:The mastery of her last works seems to defy imagining – one can only marvel at the ingenuity of their construction and the perfection of their realisation.

[3][44] Her teacher and long-time associate Professor Ian Howard described her as having "an underlying and at times painful distrust of the relationships that are part of our everyday lives".

[3] though others writing shortly after her death did not indicate that the relationship with Hooke had ended,[14] including an obituary by Howard,[52] one written by art critic John McDonald,[44] and tributes by her two biographers, Felicity Fenner[1] and Hannah Fink.

[14] In late 2017 Hannah Fink's book Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things was launched by Kip Williams at Carthona.

[62] The first "comprehensive survey of 50 key works, from the mid-1980s to the final solo exhibition in 2006" was held in Tarrawarra Museum of Art in Healesville, Victoria from 19 November 2016 to 5 February 2017.