Olivia Rains is a visual artist whose work is rooted in a life shaped by silence, resilience, and the language of the body. Born with congenital defects that left her navigating a hearing world as a deaf child, visual expression became her most natural form of communication. Years of speech therapy, painful procedures, and reconstructive ear surgeries formed the emotional architecture of her adolescence doctor’s offices becoming both battleground and classroom.

After moving to Austin, Olivia continued her journey of reclaiming communication, learning sign language and undergoing another major ear surgery to prevent life-threatening complications. These experiences of anatomy, vulnerability, movement, and the search for connection infuse every piece she creates.

Her work explores the elegant tension between the fragile and the enduring, drawing on obsessions with the human form, medical imagery, and the unspoken ways we reach for one another. Through her art, Olivia transforms her history into something vivid, visceral, and deeply communicative, a visual language all her own.