Stephanie O’Connor
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
Stephanie O’Connor works with painting and textiles, often starting from images she finds while researching a place, a period or a pattern that catches her attention. She collects visual material from books, archives and her own photos, then builds layered collages that turn into large-scale canvases. Her focus is on how stories are told through pictures, and how certain images carry more weight than they first appear to. Lately she’s also been experimenting with textiles, sometimes printing directly onto fabric, sometimes letting the material speak on its own. For her, the two approaches do different things but stay in conversation. It’s a process that shifts between collecting, editing and seeing what sticks.
Q: What draws you to certain moments in history when starting a new body of work?
A: You have to discriminate between two distinct dimensions: what people display through their patterns of consumption, and the discourses they develop, specifically the ones they use to articulate their political claims. From this perspective you can look at a painting and know its place within yourself in some irrelevant chronology, because we can all personally relate even if it is exotic and not of the current times. I’m not big on war art. And the period of Orientalism is the most fascinating and impressive to me because it is deceptively extensive.
Q: How do you choose which images or details to keep when building your visual archive?
A: At first I was using my own emotions to tell the story, but then that got a little personal and I was uncomfortable with revealing that much about myself or what I was going through, so that's where the research began. And I realized that if I could study a place, its culture, and be there, the profoundness of all that I realized is pretty incredible. I also noticed that this method makes everything serendipitous, and I prefer the anonymity where I can take myself out of the work and not have it be any sort of intentional personal expression. And with that said, the sum not always being greater than its parts because of sometimes what it takes to make.
Q: Your large-scale paintings are based on layered research and collage. What helps you shape the final composition?
A: Imagine the effect of a phrase as simple as "inoffensive" but still without content. That's not really my work. I have things to say. I have opinions. And I’m fairly informed. In today’s day and age there is an attention shift towards innovation rather than something a little more socio-economically deeper, so it's harder to get through, or it becomes potentially harder to express with all the gadgets. I try to keep in mind being polemic yet unintentional.
Q: What made you start working with handmade textiles alongside canvas?
A: Everything usually starts with some sort of surplus. Mine was finished paintings and pleats of blank canvas.
Q: How different is your process when working with ethnic patterns compared to historical drawings and paintings?
A: Not that different, actually. The images I use for my paintings are referenced from things I find more often in books. I'll be reading something and then find a picture of something I learned about. I collect the digital images. The patterns I find out in the real world, with my camera.
Q: Do you approach your textile works and your paintings as part of the same story, or do they serve different purposes for you?
A: They serve two totally different purposes for me. I can express myself with pictures. We all do. I can put together this complicated arrangement that tells the story. And I find most people can relate to each story. The textiles I’ve definitely romanticized and are intended to be fine pieces of cloth. It is a different kind of appreciation. I did make some work that was a hybrid of the two. They are more rough and hang on the wall. You could never make anything to wear out of them. But they had a great deal of research behind them as well in a sense that I was copying a technique and also sourcing material from different places. It’s a lot of regurgitation, even from the textile work into the paintings and vice versa. It’s a developmental process that keeps things moving forward.
