Featured Artist Pat O’Connor

Artist Pat O’Connor presents a collection of mixed media sculpture that represents a response to the unpredictable. Learn more by visiting her website.

 

 

My urge to create art emerged alongside my instinct to play. From my earliest memories, art and play were inseparable. In our San Francisco home, my mother encouraged this blend by setting up an art gallery for my siblings and me. I was free to paint on the walls of my bedroom, as well as on the sidewalks and streets outside our city house.

 

 

My formal journey in the arts began with inspiring teachers in high school. It continued through my academic training, which included a B.A. in Drawing and Painting from the University of California, Davis, and an M.A. in Textile Arts from San Francisco State University. These experiences offered a balance of academic rigor and experimental freedom that has shaped my artistic practice.

 

 

My current work with salvaged cardboard traces back to my graduate school years, when I became involved in the handmade paper movement of the 1980s. Later, as a recipient of a San Francisco Foundation Grant, I worked at the Netting Station, a former World War II naval base in Tiburon, California. There, I cast paper pulp outdoors over remnants of the past—concrete pilings, dilapidated rowboats, rusted pipes, weathered asphalt, and crumbling barracks.

 

 

I became captivated by how the pulp transformed as it dried and molded itself into the shape of the object it was cast onto. Wood and rusted substrates contributed a range of colored patinas to the paper’s surface. I was ever fascinated by the effects the weather and other natural phenomena had on the paper’s surface. A rainstorm once dissolved a sheet into delicate lace; another time, the wind curled its edge. On other occasions, animals left behind ghostly paw prints.

 

 

That fascination with the unpredictable—how nature, time, and chance intervene in the creative process—continues to inform my work with salvaged cardboard. I don’t purchase materials; I recover them from city streets, dumpsters, and alleyways. Friends also contribute packaging remnants.

 

 

Each piece of cardboard carries its history—weathered, worn, and marked by time. Like the cast paper of my earlier work, this weathered and worn material inspires my assemblages, which may be painted, printed, stitched, pleated, wrapped, collaged, or stacked. The possibilities are endless—and endlessly energizing.

 

 

After retiring from a fulfilling 46-year career as an arts educator, I am pleased to reignite my art exhibition schedule. My work is held in both private and public collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Recently, I was invited to join a dynamic cooperative art gallery in downtown Oakland, California, as well as an arts collective of working studios in San Francisco.

 

 

The support and exchange of ideas with fellow artists are essential to my practice. They continually challenge and inspire me. I feel fortunate to engage in a creative process that broadens my perspective on the larger themes we confront, particularly as I explore how time, weather, and other natural forces shape and transform man-made structures and materials.

 

Pat O’Connor invites you to follow on Instagram.

 

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