I was in the right place". She graduated from the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in 1980. Winning a New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1983, she then completed a master's degree at Chelsea School of Art in 1984. Her work was influenced by Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Martin Puryear under whom she studied while in England. Upon returning from the United Kingdom, she immediately met with further success, when in 1984 she won a Moet & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship. In 1988 she was granted a period as artist-in-residence in the city of Brest on the coast of Brittany, where she studied Celtic metalworking techniques. Personal life In her early twenties, Bronwyn Gooda married Leslie Oliver, taking his surname and later retaining it "despite a distressing divorce". The artist lived in the inner-western Sydney suburb of Haberfield, where she also had her studio. For 19 years up until her death, she taught art to primary school-age children at Sydney's Cranbrook School in Bellevue Hill. She was a friend of Roslyn Oxley, at whose eponymous gallery Oliver exhibited her works. Her long-term partner was wine writer Huon Hooke. Works and exhibitions Biographer Hannah Fink estimated that Oliver produced 290 works over a career of 22 years. Of these, public art works are Oliver's best known sculptures. These include Eyrie, created for Adelaide's Hyatt Hotel in 1993, and Magnolia and Palm, commissioned in 1999 by the Sydney Botanical Gardens, as part of the Sydney Sculpture Walk. That same year, Big Feathers was commissioned for the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane. 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". In 2000, Oliver's piece Entwine was a finalist in the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, while in the following year, Oliver won the University of New South Wales inaugural sculpture commission competition, with her three-metre-high Globe. Other success followed, when Trace was selected for the National Gallery of Australia's 2002 National Sculpture Prize exhibition. 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. By the 2000s most of Oliver's output constituted commissioned pieces, whether public or private. The most substantial of these is Vine, a 16.5 metre high sculpture