Jane O’Neill 01 - 24 Feb 2024

Midway Arcade

Exhibitions

Spring1883 Art Fair 2025

Denouement | 2024

Spring1883 Art fair 2023

Jeans Party | 2023

When Jane O’Neill first started drawing legs in the late 1990s, they were a statement of her active engagement with the material world. They represented striding and dancing across the earth, as opposed to her earlier fascination with an aquatic imaginary of underwater worlds and mystical sea beings. It is salutary to remember that Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid suffered the most excruciating pain when she gave up her tail for legs and a life among humans on dry land. The sacrifice ultimately cost the mermaid her life, even if it afforded her an eternal soul. Knowing that O’Neill remains deeply connected to water, through her enjoyment of both pools and the sea, I cannot imagine her forsaking her aquatic self completely.

As I study her work in close detail, I am sitting overlooking the water as a high-tide surges up and over the edge of a canal in Queensland—O’Neill’s childhood home. Between me and the sea is a swimming pool. I see legs moving through water. Ripples, moving out from the turbulence they create, interrupt the geometry of the rectilinear pool. Kicking legs are distorted and obscured by the bright splashes of light on the surface of the water. I can imagine how, in a public pool, the lane markings would sinuously twist below. Many of the legs in O’Neill’s paintings undulate like moving water, and even in boots they are reminiscent of soft, fleshy curves culminating in rippling corals. These shapely legs sometimes resemble the double tails of archaic mermaids, suggesting they could swim as much as stomp.

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Dr Courtney Pedersen (she/her) is an Australian artist/researcher and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Queensland University of Technology, living and working on the lands of the Turrbal and Yugara people