Jill Orr’s work centres on psycho-social and environmental issues. She draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment, be it country or urban locales. Orr grapples with the balance and discord that exists at the heart of relations between the human spirit, art and nature.

Jill Orr was represented in the inaugural Venice International Performance Art Week in 2012 where her work The Promised Land received international acclaim. She has since been one of ten international performance artists to present at the Bipolar Performance Art Meeting in Sopot, Poland 2014 and she has mesmerised audiences with her work for the MAP Festival, Melaka, Malaysia, 2014.

Jill is a recipient of a Australia Council Fellowship and completed her latest body of work, Antipodean Epic, which was developed from site-specific performative photographs and video that culminated in a live performance for the Mildura Palimpsest Biennale in October 2015. In 2016, Jill Orr presented The Antipodean Epic - The Quarry for the Lorne Sculpture Biennale and the third and final re-imagining was presented in an urban environment for the Belo Horizonte Biennale, Brazil. The site specificity of each incarnation of the work resulted in three unique works that responded to the extremely different environments and audiences.

Jill's installation Detritus Springs features in the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art (BOAA), 21 September to 6 November. A one-off performance of the work will take place on Friday 28 September 6-7pm, in the same venue, the George Farmer Building at 328 Eureka Street, Ballarat East.

Areas of expertise

• Performance art
• Site-specific performance
• Photography, video and physical theatre
• Painting
• Psycho-social issues surrounding environmental and place-based works
• Ephemeral works
• Documentation
• Installation
• Collaboration
• Practice-led research

Research interests

Space, Place and Recurring History are categories through which practice led research enables, articulates and deepens relations to place which have been impacted through cultural, social, historical and environmental forces. Performance, photography and video are the artistic methods through which this practice is realised.

Supervision

PhD, masters and honours