Jacquie O'Neill

How do landscapes carry memory?  

Why do ordinary places become sacred through experience?    

These thoughts occupy my mind and spill out onto the surface.  These questions sit quietly beneath my practice and lead me to my studio every morning, nestled between the tors of Bodmin Moor and the wild coastline of North Cornwall, the landscape I now call home. Far removed from the North Sea and Yorkshire Moors where I grew up, but I sense something familiar in both.
Two different places, yet somehow the same.
The thread of place and belonging entwining.  

And then a chance encounter with the Old English words kith and kin gave language to something I had already begun to try and understand after the loss of my parents, an untethering of sorts, from place and belonging. How much our relationship with both the people who shape us and the places that hold us are woven together, blurring the lines;
The bloodlines and the landlines.
With this perspective, landscape becomes so much more than scenery.

Spending time in nature and rekindling my intimacy with the land since then has changed how and what I make my work about. A quiet more contemplative practice has emerged, living close to the rhythm of the seasons, honouring the quiet rituals that mark these cycles. 

And while my familiar figurative elements and themes of spirit and the feminine may still show up, now natural pigments and botanical inks sweep across big swathes of paper and wood, shapeshifting in front of my eyes;
trees standing witness,
birds carrying messages,
objects touchstones of remembrance.
Tracing the edges where life and landscapes meet.