Statement
Pat O’Connor is an artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, assemblage, and site-responsive sculpture. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, Transmission and Mercury Twenty Galleries in Oakland, the Sasse Museum of Art in Pomona, and the Mill Valley O’Hanlon Center for the Arts. Her pieces are held in both public and private collections, including a commission at UCSF Medical Center.
She received her B.A. in Painting and Drawing from UC Davis and pursued graduate study in Textile Arts at San Francisco State University. Her honors include a San Francisco Foundation Grant, the Robert Rauschenberg-hosted Power of Art Award from the Lab School of Washington, D.C., the Arts Educator of the Year Award from the San Francisco Unified School District, and an appointment to the San Francisco Arts Commission.
O’Connor has taught widely at notable institutions, including San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley Extension, and the De Young Museum.
Bio
My work is a meditation on cycles of creation, erosion, and renewal. Early experiments casting paper pulp over structures at a former World War II naval base sparked a lasting interest in materials shaped by history and exposure. Today, I work primarily with cardboard salvaged from streets, recycling bins, and discarded packaging, drawn to surfaces marked by wear, weather, and use.
Through folding, layering, stitching, printing, and painting, I transform these fragments, along with other seemingly incongruent materials, into richly textured assemblages. Guided by shifts in patina and form, I build dense, layered surfaces that hold tension between strength and fragility, harmony and discord, and between the predictable and the unforeseen.
Cardboard, humble and impermanent, originates from trees, linking the material back to the natural world. In some works, I introduce imagery of branches and tree forms, creating both quiet and unsettled dialogues between the material’s fragile present and its living origin.
In a culture shaped by disposability, I seek to elevate overlooked materials, inviting viewers to consider the histories embedded in ordinary things and to imagine ways the industrial and natural worlds might endure together.