Cavan Reed-O'Connor

My practice observes the ambiguity of everyday through sentiment, place, and personal experience. Highlighting the relationships between presence and absence, I capture our surroundings and traces of interaction, noticing the patience of ordinary things, and the overlooked.

My work presents different narratives of apparently mundane occurrences that often go unnoticed. I question how we perceive our environment by highlighting the spaces we inhabit through images reduced to architectural forms or by using cropped views of moments of interest. Using pictorial and physical depth through low relief supports or building up layers of paint, I consider the impact of form, tone, and texture. Through my paintings, I aim to examine how much information is needed to understand an image. I use a monochromatic style to manipulate light and shadow, which suggests elements of the scene and allows the viewer to interpret what the image is referring to.

By doing so, my art invites viewers to reflect on the significance of the overlooked. I want to emphasise the process of looking; to notice the subtleties in shifts of tone and texture found in everyday surroundings