Erin Haydn O’Neill has been taking pictures since she was eleven years old. After studying Art History and Language at the University of Toronto and the University of Florence, O’Neill held a three-year apprenticeship with Florentine photographer Maestro Luciano Ricci.
She has been photographing professionally for approximately fifteen years, and has lived in Florence, Italy and Copenhagen, Denmark for the last 20 years.
O’Neill’s series, Artists and Ambience, is based on the idea of how to perceive art on a three dimensional level. She examines the rapport between art and its surroundings, focusing on its dependence upon architectural, atmospherical, cultural, and human contexts. O’Neill’s photographs of gardens, villas, and studios are developed into aesthetic atmospheres through the repositioning or addition of furniture, art, historical decoration, and other elements of this kind. After the space is photographed O’Neill then creates photopaintings, which seek to reveal more than what the naked eye is able to see through the enhancement of light and form. In doing this O’Neill creates atmospheres that are both overtly aesthetic and critical.
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