Calamities: Plastic & Fauna is an ongoing, long-term body of work examining the impact of plastic pollution on marine ecosystems through sculpture, painting, alternative photographic processes, and material installation.

Developed as a sustained practice rather than a finite series, the work uses the human body as both subject and proxy, positioning it within constructed environments composed of discarded plastic and organic forms. These assemblages function as spatial encounters rather than images alone, activating perception through scale, texture, and material presence to frame environmental collapse as an immediate, embodied condition.

Drawing on historical photographic processes alongside material experimentation, the project slows the act of looking and resists passive visual consumption. Plastic operates simultaneously as artefact and contaminant; visually seductive, materially persistent, and environmentally violent. While painting and surface treatment further destabilise the boundary between image, object, and environment.

Calamities: Plastic & Fauna is conceived as a lifelong inquiry into human responsibility, bodily vulnerability, and ecological fragility. Rather than offering instruction or spectacle, the work invites sustained, multisensory engagement, allowing its form and materials to evolve over time in response to changing environmental and cultural conditions.

The practice is developed with long-term institutional context, conservation, and public engagement as core considerations. O’Neill’s current research explores marine invertebrates, as material and conceptual agents within emerging sculptural and painted works.