Eryn O’Neill is a Canadian painter whose work examines urban transformation through walking, observation, and painting. Her practice focuses on construction landscapes, temporary infrastructure, and the shifting experience of moving through cities undergoing large-scale change.
Working from sites of active development, O’Neill observes and photographs barriers, detours, fencing, excavation, pedestrian pathways, and other structures that shape everyday movement through the city. These observations become source material for paintings that explore how urban environments are experienced through circulation, interruption, and transition.
Recent work focuses on Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) expansion and the infrastructure surrounding its construction. O’Neill is drawn to in-between states in which familiar landscapes are disrupted and temporary structures reorganize how people move through and perceive a place. Her paintings isolate these moments of transition, bringing attention to details that can easily become part of the visual background of everyday life.
Painting functions as both a visual and analytic process. Through the act of painting, observed environments are slowed down, examined, and reconfigured, allowing relationships between movement, structure, material, and space to emerge. The resulting works consider how infrastructure not only changes the physical city, but also shapes the ways we see, navigate, and experience it.