NANCY O'NEIL 
NANCY O'NEIL
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ARTIST'S STATEMENT
I have been working with glass and light for almost thirty years. Most of my work is research-based collage, fabricated out of beautiful, mouthblown glass. As a visual artist I am involved with color, line, texture and pattern, but I am equally involved with ideas and information. My pieces are both narrative and abstract, and I work with a range of techniques to develop my imagery. I handpaint, photo silk-screen and sandblast into the glass to achieve the effects that I am looking for. My work incorporates traditional glass painting and firing techniques as well as other methods that I have developed myself. In addition to the collage pieces I make cast glass blocks. These are made of molten crystal and colored glass, and are decorated with inlaid glass paintings, embossings, and photo silk-screened material. The inch-thick blocks are epoxied into panels and installed as windows and dividers. I have been creating art for the public sector since the mid-1980s. Before that I had been creating autonomous panels and showing in galleries in New York City, Westchester County, New Jersey, and Maine. The public art projects have given me the opportunity to create on a larger scale and for a broader audience. I've been able to take my fascination with the beauty and strangeness of nature and interweave it with studies of place and the passage of time. All of the work has been site specific, designed for a particular place at a particular moment. I include the work for religious institutions in this body of work, as it too has taken me into worlds that I previously knew little or nothing about. Although the public art work has been my focus, I continue to be interested in working with individuals and showing my more personal pieces. In 2003 I showed a series of small lightboxes, titled “Precarious Situations”, at the Sylvia Schmidt Gallery in New Orleans. These pieces engaged me in a different way, using humor to address the fragility and vulnerability that we all live with. |