Diana Olson lives inside a fairytale. From the deck of her home in Charleston, she enjoys 180-degree views of the tide-driven Joe Ney Slough. Fir trees pierce the sky, herb plants scent the afternoon air, and art in every stage of creation lies thick on the ground, on the tables, on the walls.

In a studio adjacent to the house, Olson stores tools, supplies and boxes of inspiration. There are two spinning wheels, two looms, an industrial-size clothes rack draped with plastic bags stuffed with mysterious projects, and an empty, three-story dolls’s house. There are shanks of brightly colored fibers, and bags of pine cones. Next door, her garage houses her ceramic kiln, kayak and “glass-making stuff.”

Inside her fairytale, Olson manipulates surfaces. She paints, carves, stitches and glues. In her hands, objects mutate and rearrange in accordance with subterranean currents or subtle, atmospheric shifts. Diana Olson’s art is the result of a blatantly intuitive process, buttressed by concrete skills and decades of experience.

She holds a bachelors’s degree from Ohio State, a master’s in counseling from Cal State Long Beach, and is a graduate of the Los Angeles Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

Of her years in school she says, “I was sent to college not to get an education, but a husband.”

Olson married, had four children in five years, and with her family moved nine times over the 14-year period of her marriage.

This month, she is the featured artist at the Coos Bay Public Library, where her art dolls, peering from within the lobby’s tall glass cases or hanging from the interior walls, introduce the show’s theme, “Pop Psychology Through Folk Art: A sequential look-read-think exhibit.”

Olson uses the doll series to deliver her interpretation of a “feminist ’50s fairytale.” We see Cinderella, Fairy Godmother, and the Prince, each isolated within their frames, shamelessly stereotypical and just barely three-dimensional. Suggested reading is Colette Downing’s “Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence” and the Jordan Paul, Margaret Paul book, “Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You?”

“I made these people and they were in a box,” reveals the artist, “and I wondered, ‘what on earth?’”

She made more dolls. A Frog Prince, and his subservient Princess. An Ice Queen. King Midas. Sleeping Beauty, and some lovely mermaids.

“Until I framed them, I didn’t know what was happening,” Olson said.

The exhibit includes some of her art wear as well (available locally at Bay Moss Studio, Coos Bay), including a ravishing “Psyche Coat” that reads like a journey of self-discovery.

Another fabric piece, inspired by her Mennonite grandmother’s garden, is a study in the art of miniatures. Olson has stitched beaded grapes, cherry trees, a geranium box, yellow forsythia and elegant pussy willows. Here, she adds a little ant and over there, a tiny bee.

“It’s one of my specialities: the closer you get, the more you see. There should be all these little surprises,” declares Olson, adding, “We can find all these things but if we don’t put them in context, they’re sort of meaningless.”

The artist bravely displays important, iconic and personal associations throughout every inch of this exhibit. In doing so, Diana Olson invites the viewer to look at objects anew, to perceive their symbolically parallel functions, and to accept the truth — however and whenever it is found.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. Comments are welcome, and can be e-mailed to malbert@uci.net.