Creating Relationships

Teresa O’Connor is a visual artist and educator working at the intersections of painting, cameraless photography, wild botanical and mineral pigment making, and place based relationship and care as a means of expressing her experience of kinship and interbeing with the living world.

Collaborating With

She collaborates with land, light, and elemental forces to create her artworks, and is drawn to experimental processes that provide a path for her to surrender control as a maker, and enter into conversation with the materials of the Earth. Through the use of light sensitive mineral solutions (cyanotype), trees, plants, and organic matter render their forms onto surfaces (paper, wood, cloth) to create lightscapes that evoke land, water, sky and cosmos. 

Her studio is the land that surrounds her - her garden, local parks, the urban environment, and wild lands - dynamic ecologies that offer organic materials - rocks, soil, clay, bark, roots, seeds, botanicals - that she gathers and transforms into pigments, inks, paints and dyes. The emergent artworks arise from an expansive and deep dialogue with the living landscapes she is in communication with. Through listening, walking, and sitting with, she enters into an intuitive portal of co-creation.

Teaching and sharing lessons and learning

In her work as a nature educator with young children, she centers joyful, imaginal play, care and stewardship, and sensory, immersive experiences. Through movement, song, storytelling, edible foraging, and Earth inspired art making, she opens space for children’s innate ability to merge fully into connective relationship with each other and wild places. She models language that honors our human interdependence with the more-than-human world, and practices that recognize and uphold their agency and subjecthood through care, respect and gratitude.

Her practices as an artist and nature educator intertwine and inspire each other as she offers her heart-centered approach with humans of all ages.

Professional Background

Teresa O’Connor is an artist, educator, gardener, and folk herbalist based on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands (San Francisco, California). She attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and received her BA from San Francisco State University. She has completed graduate coursework in the field of Land Art, and taken courses with established land based artists - Alice Fox, India Flint, Day Schildkret (Earth Altar Practioner Training), Sasha Duerr (Masterclass in Botanical Dyeing), and Tilke Elkins (Masterclass in Earth Pigment Making).

Her past artistic practice has included extensive investigation into the materials of wool, cloth and thread through methods of felting, sewing, stitching, weaving, and botanical dyeing and printing. Her felted wool pieces have been part of exhibitions at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in San Geronimo, CA, and the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA (in collaboration with artist in residence and filmmaker, Natalie Zimmerman).

She works as an Earth Educator in the fields of Nature Connection and Stewardship, and Visual Arts in a Preschool - 2nd Grade Forest School program in Marin County, California, and at Hawk Creek Farm in San Francisco, CA. She collaborates with fellow Earth Educator and Clinical Herbalist, Chloe Corsini to offer WildCraft Nature Days, a nature-based art and herbal medicine program for young children in Marin County, CA. She is also an active member of the National SEED project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), a peer-led professional development program that promotes change through self reflection and interpersonal dialogue.