jill orr

Jill Orr has delighted, shocked and moved audiences through her performance installations which she has presented in cities such as Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Antwerp New York, Toronto, Quebec City, Graz, Hong Kong, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane from the late nineteen seventies to now.

Orr’s work centres on issues of the psycho- social and environmental where she draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment be it country or urban locales.

Orr’s early iconic work Bleeding Trees has led to  commissions such as Marriage of the Bride to Art,  Raising the Spirits, Exhume the Grave, Hunger, The Myer Windows, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters - Goya and Ash, to name only a few works which have contributed to the contemporary cultural landscape. Orr grapples with the balance and discord that exists at the heart of relations between the human spirit, art and nature.

In 2004 Jill Orr created From the Sea about the wild shipwreck coastline of Warrnambool. This panoramic video installation was created in collaboration with the Gunditmara Aboriginal Community from Warrnambool. From the Sea began a body of work that traces overlapping histories of indigenous and non- indigenous relations to place. She has recently completed The Crossing, which was presented for the 2007 Mildura and Wentworth Festival. “Jill Orr is a fiery artist and her work expresses the beauty, power and spiritual depth that is her trade mark.” - Helen Vivian, Catalogue essay Jill Orr, Ash - Independent Curator, Producer and Publisher, Director, Artmoves Inc.