Marcie O’Neill.
Marcie O’Neill (b. Brisbane) lives and works on Bundjalung Country / Byron Bay Shire. He is a Sculptor, Painter and Performance artist. Marcie has exhibited and performed around the world including spoken word performances with members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, traditional Taiko drummers in Tokyo as well as performances in New York and Thailand. He founded and curated multidisciplinary space Spacejunk Gallery in Manly (2001 - 7). From 1989 - 2010 Marcie was Aloha Surfboards’ airbrush artist, and from 2010-17 fashion designer and chief surfboard designer and shaper at Aloha Surfboards.
The creative process for Marcie is the same across all mediums. That is, distilling from the white noise and static of life, meaningful narrative, and symbolism, so that we might find some order in chaos. Marcie’s art is an attempt to map our existential landscape and to describe how we project ourselves upon it. His works are rickety bridges between the conscious and unconscious mind. They describe the fragile construct in which we vibrate between happiness and sadness and how we reconcile the moments and memories that connect the two.
He is by his own admission, a happy but worried person.
2024 - Transmissions From The Fertile Void
PREVIOUS SOLO EXHIBITION 2024
I believe my art to be messages that are not confined by the constraints of language or form. Whether it’s through the integrative interdisciplinary techniques of my paintings, the tactile reality of my sculptures, or the rhythm and rhyme of my spoken word performances, each piece is an attempt to map our existential landscape and to describe how we project ourselves upon it.
At the heart of my artistic inquiry lies the enigmatic concept of the "fertile void" - a space where contradictions coexist, where the duality of light and dark, the known and the unknown, finds harmony. It is in this liminal space that my work seeks to dwell, to probe, and to reveal. The egg, a motif recurrent in this body of work, serves as a potent symbol for this exploration. It represents the delicate balance between the conscious and unconscious mind, a vessel where possibilities are incubated.
