Eryn O'Neill

Eryn O’Neill is a Canadian painter whose work examines urban transformation through walking, observation, and studio translation. Her practice focuses on construction landscapes, temporary infrastructure, and the shifting experience of pedestrian movement within cities undergoing large-scale change.

Working from sites of active development, O’Neill documents barriers, detours, fencing, excavation, and pedestrian pathways. These environments are recorded through photography, then reinterpreted through painting. The resulting works explore how bodies navigate spaces shaped by disruption, circulation, and transition.

Recent work focuses on Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) and related infrastructure expansion. O’Neill’s paintings emphasize in-between states, where temporary architectures reshape movement and alter familiar routes. Painting functions as an analytic process, translating observed conditions into compositions that foreground rhythm, obstruction, and spatial tension.