Tina O'Connell
As an artist originally from West Coast of Ireland, Tina O’Connell has been living and working in Brixton, London, since completing both an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London and a postgraduate degree at Les Beaux Art de Marseilles, France. Drawing on her agricultural background in rural Ireland, her early sculptures were developed whilst undertaking the prestigious Henry Moore Fellowship in Sculpture and were monumental in scale and material. This grounding in sculptures traditional qualities has since been developed in work that examines the nature of permanence, stability and materials associated with public sculpture. Through a highly refined aesthetic that embraces a range of non-sculptural materials, from bitumen to light, her investigations and materials based inquiry remains grounded in key themes of personal loss and memory, often realised as exquisite forms subject to slow forms of deconstruction, from anthropogenic noise to temporal decay.
Most recently, her work has started to explore her memories of Irelands natural landscapes and the increasing pace of erasure of biodiverse environments due to the impacts of humans. This led to the co-curation of Perfect Nature with artist Neal White – an exhibition in Amstelpark, Amsterdam and a new collabortive work; Nature of Truth (funded by Mondriaan Funds), following a long residency in Amsterdam (Nieuw en Meer / Zone2source – 2022). This work was presented recently as part of The Soil Assemblies (Kochi Biennale, India – 2023) and continues as a project that explores the long terms impact of anthropogenic noise (human pollution) through media including film, sculpture and performance based investigations.
Submitted by Blackbird Rook
