Emilie O'Brien

Various media on paper, various sizes, 2025-26

An evolving collection of drawings in earth inks, graphite and coloured pencil on paper - some complete, others works in progress. All originate during weekly meetings and interviews through the ILM Collective.

The ILM Collective is a transdisciplinary collective of artists, composers and scientists creating emergent artworks through exploration of complex systems.
https://www.instagram.com/ilm_collective/

Colour photographs, 2025

Selection of colour photographs I am making through the Methane Gas Leaks Research-Creation project - an endevour headed by myself and Montreal painter Sylvia Rack in collaboration with McGill University scientists from the GHG-Montreal Project.

Our creative project aims to present an alternative mapping of the gas leak networks through artwork and installation-based exhibitions in communities affected by the leaks.

These are my photographs documenting meetings with scientists in the field, visits to the parks, and ecology we encounter on-site, and can be seen as evolving artworks.

This project is in the early stages of development.

Colour photographs, 2025

Charcoal, chalk pastel, oil media, graphite, coloured pencil on cotton, H 274.5 x W 215.0 cm, 2024

Energy Bodies traces core and subtle energy flows. Using bilateral drawing techniques, I drew it with two hands simultaneously.

Rhythmic and as fast or slow-moving as needed, this embodied art therapy technique is an effective interruption to linear, analytical thinking and stuffed-up emotions, and a useful tool for living in a fraught world.

Cotton, linen, silk embroidery on cotton and linen, H 122.0 x W 131.0 cm, 2024

As I stitch, I exhale. Time passes more slowly, and my emotions and racing mind find a place to rest as my hands pull thread. Each seed added turns my thoughts toward hope, each stitch an active choice to move forward in some way, even if it’s unclear what the future holds.

Thinking about my practice as ‘grief work’ is helped by the work of buddhist-philosopher and deep ecologist Joanna Macy. She is an early proponent of the power of connecting with grief as a way to shift our relationships with other living beings, including the earth. During the Vietnam war, Macy recognized that people could be brought into a different kind of activism through realizing the landscape of their feelings in connection to the issue. What Macy found was that underneath feelings like anger, depression, and despair lies a deeper emotion - that of grief.

This is a kind of somatic work that entails unearthing emotions related to overwhelming events from personal to collective; events that may seem entirely beyond our influence.
Grief-work is the work of our time.

Cotton, linen and silk embroidery and nylon appliqué on recycled wool, H122.0 x W 167.64 cm, 2024

The story of this embroidery begins a long time ago. Further back than my own birth.

This embroidery is the story of my learning how to scream, and how that scream turned into song. In that exact moment, I learned that my body was holding a kind of sacred rage that was bigger than me. I felt something grateful and ancestral rush through me and forward even, into generations waiting to be born. This rage and grief is born from deep injustices of the past, carried by blood and relationship forward, at times triggered by injustice in the present. Sung out to be nourished and take flight.

Cyanotype on cotton rag paper, 45.5 × 25.5 cm, 2024

Made in collaboration with Motherwort.

Plants and humans have co-evolved over millenia. Plant medicine is the original medicine.

Cyanotype on cotton, H 213.0 x W 152.0 cm, 2024

Botanical cyanotype created in collaboration with the medicinal plant, Motherwort.

Motherwort’s Latin name is Leonurus Cardiaca, meaning Lion-hearted. Vigorous and beautiful, this herb (wort) is traditionally used to support those born in a female body, those who mother (hence its common name) and is a primary plant for the heart.

Hanging Altar, cyanotype on cotton, hawthorn berries and thorns, motherwort and rose ink, H 305.0 x W 138.0 cm, 2024

Botanical cyanotype and installation created in collaboration with Motherwort, Hawthorn berries and thorns, Rose petals and Rosehips.

Rose and Hawthorn join Motherwort in their affinity for the heart: Motherwort is well-known for strengthening the heart and calming palpitations - hence it’s latin name, Leonurus Cardiaca. Likewise, Hawthorn leaves, flowers, berries and thorns are known widely for their medicinal properties in strengthening the heart. Rose essence is said to open our hearts to love and to heal them from grief, sadness and depression.

Along with so much else, we need good heart medicine for this time on Earth - for the hearts of every one of us, our communities and our planet.

Cotton, linen, Motherwort dye and botanical ink, applique and han-embroidery, cyanotype on cotton, H 213.0 x W 152.0 cm, 2024.

Made in collaboration with Motherwort, Rose petals and rose hip, Hawthorn berries and thorns.

Cotton embroidery, cotton and linen applique on recycled cotton, 274.5 × 250.0 cm, 2023

Whitework is an embroidery technique that traditionally uses a multitude of stitches with predominantly white threads and textiles. I have chosen this cotton blanket and the technique/s deliberately, re-defining Whitework within a contemporary context of decolonizing and anti-racism work.

Alongside the straight stitches is a patch of Shadow work, also a technique of whitework. A term coined by Carl Jung, Shadow work also refers to the importance of bringing unresolved traumas into the light so they can be (hopefully) healed. With this in mind, my repair takes the shape of a potato leaf, in a nod to my great-great-great grandparents who immigrated from Ireland to Les Iles de Madelaine at the time of the Great Potato famine.

Through this and many other aspects of my recent practice, I aim to acknowledge and repair areas of damage, in turn strengthening the overall integrity.

Digital photographic evidence of the action of writing down the Indigenous place name Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), onto the land itself, using land-elements at hand. Dates on going.

”Place names can intervene in settler colonialism by animating Indigenous history, reminding people of the ancestors of these lands.” from the Yellowhead Institute’s Reclaiming Indigenous Place Names by Christina Gary and Daniel Rück

Natural pigments on vellum 12 x 16”

Found poem from the book Kissing The Limitless, by T Thorne Coyle - author, teacher, artist, and activist from the United States.

At this crucial time in history, where the wellbeing of life on earth hangs precariously on human action - How do settlers move forward in making meaning on stolen land?

Digital photographs, video and in-situ ritual and song. 2022

This project documents a small bit of land belonging to a large stretch of previously abandoned rail yards, now owned and being built upon by the University of Montreal. People come here for the quiet, vast open skies and unruly eco-systems that have co-created the until-now terrain vague (undefined land). Of the over 65 acres of land, none has yet been returned to the Kanien'kehá:ka Nation who steward the island of Montreal/Tiohtiake.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and activists across the globe have shown that Indigenous peoples know best how to take care of their lands and waters. #Land back and partnership with Indigenous peoples is key to climate and social justice.

Cotton embroidery on wool, 91.5 ft x 91.5 cm, 2020

An attempt to represent through simple geometrical lines ‘the [established] primacy of the inseparable whole’, to quote Hawaiian epistemologist Dr Manulani Meyer, in which she refers to the holographic trilogy - that of mind, body, and spirit - that both creates and connects all that lives.

“Like a living bridge, dreamwork is a practice in which we coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation—and in so doing, restore our membership in belonging.” Toko-Pa Turner

Cotton on wool, 2019
H 117 x W 135 cm

Porcelain, digital photographs, 2018

A document of tree sticks and branches, based on a collection my young son and I made for several years. When I was seeking a project I might integrate into my life as a mother, I began photographing our installations and rendering the collected sticks in porcelain whenever I had a spare hour.

Bones is an homage - to this time spent with my son who is just awakening to the world around him, and to the enchantment children infuse our world with, as it was my son who first called the sticks bones. This project, then, is also in homage to the trees whose bones litter our streets and parks and whose presence we often take for granted - especially now, when this crises of climate is asking us to renew and re-enchant our relationship with the earth.

Field Notes is a documentary mapping project done in 2011, of a local “terrain vague” called Les Champs des Possibles, located in Montreal, Canada. Through embroideries, interviews, photographs and short videos that captured simple moments, this project was an intensive process that involved many walks and meditative sits, early morning and late night visits, conversation with community members, community consultations, and long, laborious embroidery work. The largest of the maps measures 2 x 3 feet.

The final work was included in a larger, online, geopolitical mapping project called Detours, curated and designed by Taien-Ng Chan, for Agency TOPO in Montreal.
Detours can be found here: http://www.agencetopo.qc.ca/detours/main_en.html

This project explores imperfect silences in human-mediated places. Use of basic smart-phone technologies to capture visual and auditory examples.
2018 - 2021

An ongoing collection of found, paper-based photographs of women, uploaded into an online archive, titled her. This project originally went online for International Women’s Day in 2014, and has also been exhibited in its paper-based form.
This collection is a celebration of our stories as women, most of which go unheard, and many of which overlap. Declaring that all of our stories are important, this project acknowledges that through approaching each other with curiosity and openness we will both learn from our differences and honour our shared histories.

A series of a hundred ‘found’ short embroidered phrases and words, collected from fragments of conversation, movie posters, books, etc. 2008 - 2014.

These words are a cheeky nod to self-help affirmations, containing helpful hints alongside of a sense of anxiety about getting it right.

Playing with softness and urban terrain vague to explore the mutable and impermanent nature of form, this series uses textiles such as tulle, satin, vinyl and lace to create temporary sculptures.

Temporary Series Berlin, 2008

Temporary Series Mexico City, 2007

An earlier work, the Swimmer stands at over 7 feet tall; hand-embroidered in cotton on wool, the figure of a woman stands facing the viewer clothed in a swimming suit and goggles. She has the necessary gear to navigate the underwater realm. Swimmer is about seeing within, and doing what it takes to get through difficult life situations where mental and emotional health are compromised. She is an icon of strength, and is meant to impose her stature upon the viewer, much like sculptures and depictions of goddess figures in temples of the past.