Oldenburg’s practice examines how material culture reflects and distorts human vulnerability. Her sculptures begin with fragments of the built world—stones, clay, string, and discarded domestic goods—objects that already bear traces of use and history. Through acts of collecting, layering, and reconstruction, she transforms these remnants into charged forms that oscillate between protection and exposure, survival and excess.

She approaches materials as extensions of lived experience. Each work is both an accumulation and a rupture, holding within it the contradictions of intimacy, consumption, and decay. Her process is deeply physical and repetitive, involving molding, binding, puncturing, and rebuilding. This labor becomes a meditation on the limits of control and the body’s role in systems of production and desire.

Central to her practice is an exploration of value, excess, and waste. Drawing on the writings of Georges Bataille, Oldenburg treats the surplus of contemporary life as both symptom and metaphor. The act of accumulation—whether of possessions, labor, or emotion—becomes an erotics of survival in a culture where human worth is mediated by things. Her sculptures expose the instability of this system, revealing how objects absorb social and economic trauma even as they promise comfort or permanence. Many of her works contain imprints or remnants of previous pieces, creating a lineage of forms that reproduce and decompose over time. This cyclical approach suggests that objects, like bodies, carry generational memory. Through this process of reuse and recursion, Oldenburg questions what it means to live within a culture that measures identity through accumulation.

Ultimately, her work stages a confrontation between the intimate and the systemic. The sculptures’ hybrid, bodily forms resist clear categorization, embodying a protest against the reduction of life to material value. By transforming fragments of the everyday into complex, sensual, and uneasy objects, Oldenburg renders visible the fragile entanglement of matter, emotion, and survival.