Jill O'Bryan

Jill O'Bryan, The Shape of the Sound of Breath, graphite and oil stick on Bhutan Mitsumata rice paper, 16 x 32", 2019.

Jill O'Bryan (born 1956) is an American contemporary artist whose work draws upon breath, bodily movement and the natural environment in order to examine the experience of being, time and place. She is most known for her "Breath Drawings," in which she records each of her breaths with an individual mark thousands of times, and her ground rubbings (frottages), which document her physical engagement with the New Mexico desert mesa. Southwest Contemporary wrote, "O’Bryan’s artmaking is not an act of representational picture-making but a practice of accumulating the residue of recorded time and place through the physical actions of her body. Her process is performative, specifically located in time and space, and records moment-to-moment interactions with the elements."

O'Bryan has exhibited in drawing, artist-book and other surveys at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Kemper Art Museum, Katonah Museum of Art, Hafnarfjör∂ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art (Iceland), New Mexico Museum of Art and National Gallery of Art, She lives and works in SoHo, Manhattan and New Mexico with her husband, artist Charles Ross. In 1990, she earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, then moved to New York City with the help of a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program fellowship (1991–92). Center for Contemporary Arts (Santa Fe, 2017), Margarete Roeder Gallery (New York, 2018, 2019) and published articles in Art Journal, n.paradoxa, The Drama Review, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.

Jill O'Bryan, Element Painting: Green (Water), watercolor on Bhutan Mitsumata rice paper, 64" x 110" inches, 2020.

Work and reception Writers have characterized O'Bryan's work as meditative, spare and minimalist, rigorous and performative. They were made by laying out large sheets of white paper on the mesa, then lying on top of the paper and making rubbings with chunks of graphite to reveal impressions and pull out the texture of the rocks below. Reviewers have likened these works (e.g., the 12-foot-tall, scroll-like Untitled #10, 2008 or NM.1.22, 2022), variously, to human skin or X-rays, and Australian Aboriginal drawings. They have suggested that her mark-making in these drawings embeds the landscape into paper (rather than describing it), facilitating its organic emergence from the white surface. The sculpture consists of reflective, polished chrome text of the work's title, in script. "One billion" represents O'Bryan's calculation of the breaths a person would take in a long life of roughly 97 years. Colby College Museum of Art, Davis Museum, National Gallery of Art Library, New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky Collection, among other collections.