Natalie Leontaris O’Connor

Natalie Leontaris O’Connor is a Sydney based artist and researcher whose practice emerges from her Greek Australian heritage and a sustained engagement with colour as material and lived experience. Working across painting, installation and site responsive inquiry, she explores how pigment carries memory, geography and human presence, shaped by movement between cultures and landscapes.

Her early work developed in the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area at Lake Mungo, where she undertook extended research into red earth pigments embedded within some of the continent’s oldest geological formations. These investigations into deep time and material colour have evolved over the past two years toward an exploration of ancestry, diaspora and belonging across Australia and Greece.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Natalie worked in the international colour manufacturing industry, an experience that informs her understanding of pigment as material shaped by both geological origin and industrial transformation. This dual perspective underpins a studio methodology in which material enquiry and conceptual research operate as one.

In 2022 she was awarded a PhD from UNSW Art and Design for her thesis The Nature of Redness: A Practice Based Research into Red Pigments to Offer a New Understanding of Material Colour, which reframes red as a phenomenon shaped by geology, light and context rather than symbolism alone. She has exhibited widely across Australia and developed exhibition initiatives for Winsor and Newton in Australia and the United Kingdom.

“Colour is not an image of place but an encounter with it. I approach pigment as living matter, shaped by density and time. With red as the ground of my palette, as blood in the land, I move between the ancient earth of Australia and the land of Greece, marked by myth and conflict. Colour becomes a way of thinking through these correspondences, where landscape and people are formed through shared histories and ways of being.”