Photo by Eryca Green @green_st_studio
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. O’Connor’s artwork, consists of a series of experimental observations of a unique landscape in remote Australia have been exhibited in numerous public and private galleries, including Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, Hazelhurst Arts Centre, Charles Sturt University Gallery, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, Concordia Gallery and Griffin Gallery, London UK.
More recently, she has expanded her practice to include collaborative projects, field-based residencies and cross‑disciplinary research in both Australia and Greece. Her current work traces the movement of colour across generations and geographies, examining how materials—whether earth, mineral or manufactured—encode personal and collective histories. Alongside her studio practice, she continues to publish and present research on material colour, contributing to conversations at the intersection of art, science and cultural heritage.
O’Connor lives and works on Dharawhal land in Sydney, where she maintains an active exhibition practice and ongoing research into the ways colour shapes our understanding of place, identity and belonging.
Photo by Eryca Green for Margot Magazine