Finalist Byron Arts Magazine Prize 2023
Finalist Wyndham Art Prize 2026

Marcie O’Neill is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, painting, and performance on Bundjalung Country in the Byron Bay Shire, Australia.

His practice explores memory, ritual, imbalance, and the psychological relationship between bodies, objects, and space.

Through fragmented sculptural forms and materially distressed surfaces, O’Neill creates works that exist between ruin and preservation, structures that appear simultaneously archaeological, ceremonial, and deeply personal. Central to his practice is an investigation into vulnerability as a site of transformation, considering healing not as restoration, but as a continual process of reconstruction shaped by time, memory, and experience.

His work draws on ideas surrounding spatial psychology, emotional residue, and the fallibility of memory, often constructing immersive environments that invite contemplation and embodied reflection. Repetition, erosion, and ritualistic processes are used throughout his practice as methods of both making and meaning.

Alongside his visual arts practice, O’Neill has performed internationally, including collaborations with members of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, traditional Taiko drummers in Tokyo, and performances in New York and Thailand.

This performative sensibility continues to inform his sculptural work through its attention to rhythm, tension, movement, and presence.

O’Neill’s practice ultimately seeks to map the unstable terrain between memory and matter, examining how places, objects, and experiences continue to shape the emotional architectures we inhabit.