Mary A O'Brien

Mary O’Brien is an artist, writer and poet. Her writing evolves out of her engagement with place and community, and the research she develops for land art installations. Her non-fiction works delve into ecological loss, disappearing wildness, and community resilience. She writes about political landscapes and our anthropocentric relationships with them—the ways in which wars, capital, and infrastructure have molded lands and communities.

O’Brien’s public art installations are collaborations with her partner, the artist Daniel McCormick. Their works can be found across the US. These are environmental art installations with restorative outcomes—land art projects that take on current and local conservation challenges through the artists’ aesthetic lens. Together they created remedial land art installations for The Nature Conservancy, the City of Palo Alto, Pasadena Public Works Department, Santa Clara Valley Water District, the Port of Venice Louisiana, and the Parks and Rec Department of Charlotte, North Carolina.

O’Brien’s essays and poems have been published in Field to Palette, Stanford University’s MAHB Journal; The Solutions Journal; Women’s Eco Artist Dialogue Journal, Silver Birch Press, and Soren Lit. They contribute, in a remedial way, to the restoration of lands and waters. The work itself, becomes an act of activism.