Lillian O’Neil: The light that spills across the ground between shadows
- When 28 Jun - 8 Sep 2024
- Where
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Address
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021
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Hours
WED TO FRI 10AM–5PM; SAT TO SUN 12–5PM
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Phone
+61 2 8936 0888
Lillian O’Neil makes collages about the human condition, using found imagery from pre‐digital books and magazines to short-circuit visual information, with bodies taking on peculiar hybrid characteristics, surfaces merging with print textures, and the junctures between body, architecture, day, night, earth and sky all disintegrating.
O’Neil’s new body of large-format collages considers ideas about the self and a multiplicity of selves, or split selves, experienced during matrescence, a term coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the time of mother-becoming. A sense of unrest and overstimulation characterises this physical, hormonal, and emotional period. While O’Neil isn’t interested in illustrating motherhood in a literal sense, her experiences of having two children during lockdown periods in rural Victoria inform her approach to imagining the body and the psychic space it inhabits during this period.
The exhibition title comes from Annie Ernaux’s book Les Années (The Years) 2008. The writer uses descriptions of photographs to frame an account of her life and place with the larger narrative of French history and culture. Ernaux writes: “The distance that separates past from present can be measured, perhaps, by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress—by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.”
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Curated by José Da Silva
Commissioned for the 18th Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Art: Inner Sanctum and with the support of the UNSW Galleries New Contemporaries Fund.
Public Program
Panel: On Photography, Intimacy, and Indexing Time
2–3pm Saturday 29 June 2024
Learn more about the photographic practices of Australian artists Lillian O’Neil and Paul Knight in conversation with Dr Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Australia. Together they will discuss photography’s relationship to time, including the capacity to disrupt linear measures by entangling the present with the past and near future. The conversation will offer insight into O’Neil and Knight’s practices which explore themes around the human condition and understandings of self. The artists will reflect on their shared interests in documenting private lives and tracing moments of intimacy within the domestic sphere.
Tile: Lillian O’Neil, Between Shadows, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Gadigal Nura/Sydney
Banner: Lillian O’Neil, The place we dissolve, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial, Gadigal Nura/Sydney
Exhibition Documentation: Installation view, 'Lillian O'Neil: The light that spills across the ground between shadows', UNSW Galleries, 2024. Courtesy the artist and The Commercial, Gadigal Nura/Sydney. Pictured: 1. Lillian O'Neil, Family, Steady, and Lilies, 2024; 2. Midnight, The winds hand, and The place we dissolve, Theirs alone, and The light that spills across the ground between shadows, 2023; 3. Half stone and Through glass, 2023. Photography: Jacquie Manning.