EM25 Conversations: Olly O'Neill

In the run-up to the EM25 show opening, Intervals, Olly O’Neill discusses how he considers line, text and shape in his abstract paintings, confidence as a major factor in his work, and the evolution of his practice as a student— from foundation course to Master’s.

Would you say your work changed a lot at Norwich? How would you say the two periods of studying for your BA and MA compare?

When I started the BA, I wasn’t an artist. I would’ve said that I was an illustrator. I started on illustration at foundation level but that quite quickly changed. In the first couple of weeks, someone told me I would change to fine art and I was like, “No, I don’t think so.” But then I did, (laughs) very quickly! I made friends with people and had these really good relationships which allowed me to have fun. The foundation course anyway was amazing for letting you have fun; not worrying about buying materials or making a mess. It was about enjoying what you were doing and finding your feet. Most of the BA I was going through many movements in my own work. COVID affected my Year 1 and Year 2 [but] I stuck with it and when we came back [after COVID restrictions] it was just amazing. Because I still knew how to use all the facilities from the previous year, I knew what there was available and quickly picked it back up. I finished off the BA doing messy, painterly work with text and I think that finished off all the storylines of my practices. I didn’t like the work I showed for our final show, though, it just wasn’t very good… it wasn’t confident enough. Confidence is something I’ve always really strived for in my work, like, how does it come across as confident? Even if you are not confident in it…

Credit: @therealollyoneill

… So I started the MA and started on textiles, like fashion design and tailoring. It was so hard but I learned so much from that. I learned how to be patient, how to think ahead and how to plan and how making a mistake early will cause problems later. Even though I came away from painting for about a year, I learned so much about painting from doing that. I really struggled with fine art through my MA with finding what my work was. When I find a new person’s work who I really like, I accidentally copy it. You are being confident in someone else’s work which is a good way to learn but it’s not a good way to express yourself. I struggled with that for a while but just at the end I found what I was doing.

Do you think you’ll ever know for sure what your work is or will be?

No, definitely not. I’ve always been searching in my work for the “what do I do?” but that never stays the same. It will never settle down because I’m always changing what I do in my life. Whether that’s a different activity, different location, watching different films... Weirdly, I think the only thing that doesn’t change in my work is that it always changes.

As someone working in the abstract realm of painting, would you say line and colour are at the forefront of your mind?

I think I use lines more than I use shape. I don’t think about it in that way, though, I think about them as marks. There are a lot of things that Philip Guston said about lines and I try to also think about it as mass and area, rather than shape. I’ve been thinking a lot about Mark Rothko, lately, and that also doesn’t feel like shapes but it feels like ‘area’. I’ve used a lot of lines in this [work for the residency] but I don’t think about them as lines anymore.

Maybe this line or mass, or whatever you want to call it, is the common thread in your work regardless of medium…

Yeah, I think working in so many different mediums and having a more open-ended way to refer to them really helps and I guess shape is just a higher volume of marks. Let’s say it is [the common thread]. That’s what it is: putting marks on.

“I’ve always been searching in my work for the “what do I do?” but that never stays the same. It will never settle down because I’m always changing what I do in my life. Whether that’s a different activity, different location, watching different films…. Weirdly, I think the only thing that doesn’t change in my work is that it always changes.”

How does this approach we’ve just been discussing relate to what you’re making upstairs in the Project Space?

When I started, a lot of what I was making was safe. I was getting quite frustrated about that and I wasn’t liking what I was doing. When Yelena [Popova] lead our group crit, I had to present work I didn’t like which was really challenging. I think doing that, however, and struggling to talk about it to lots of new people meant that a lot of the things that she suggested were, in a way, things I knew I had to do. It really helped me get out of this rut where I was trying to do something safe when I had so much change going on. 

Where did you go from there?

The group crit was on a Tuesday and I had to drive back to Norwich on the Wednesday evening to help my partner move [back up to Nottingham] and to move the rest of my stuff here. That took about three hours and I was just thinking in the car, ‘What can I do?’ I was trying to think about what’s personal to me and how do I make that my process. A lot of the artists showed in the group crit work to do with their experience growing up, memory, or community…

…It got me thinking, ‘What do I identify with and what would people like me identify with?’ Skateboarding for me has been a really big thing for me. I grew up watching extreme sports channels and watching the skaters in the car park at the back of my house. I started skating in high school and that got me through all of that. I’ve started skating again, coming back here, now I have more time. The scene here, too, [in Nottingham] is amazing. I felt like that was a way to make my process more personal. Thinking about imagery and text, I was trying to think about references that people still identify with and that also still hold up aesthetically with my work. That’s so important. That is when I started making the work that is in the gallery now. 

Do you think people will look at the work and immediately see this skateboard-themed throughline you’ve described? 

Maybe. I kind of don’t want them to at the same time. I want it to be removed enough from that that it holds up and feels distinguished. There’s this aura that artwork has that feels really confident and refined enough in its methods that you forget it has all of this baggage. I want it to feel like that but I also really want it to reference these things. I want it to be obvious to those who have that understanding that this is what I’ve done and this is who I am.

What are your plans for after the residency? You can take that question any way you wish…

I want to do another [residency]. I think the format is really good for my work. I’m spending an amount of time figuring out a process, refining it and then showing my workings out. That really suits my work. I can also make it quickly. Say I did a residency alone and a solo-show at the end, I would have enough to really show that process. It’s about both the residency process and the process of making. I want [a residency] to be like that; I want to capture my whole process, [and] the whole month in what I show at the end.

Interview by Orla Sprosen.

You can find out more about Olly O’Neill’s work on Instagram (@therealollyoneill).

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