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.