Marcus O’Donnell is an artist, writer and academic. His practice brings painterly mark-making and printmaking into relationship with photography and digital aesthetics. He works in series exploring mythical narratives to convey a sense of marginalised histories or the barely perceptible in the everyday. With abstract variations on the landscape, still life and portraiture traditions, he investigates our troublesome representation of ‘nature’, and ‘bodies’ all at once beautiful, monstrous and mysterious. His images often begin with close-focused photography of foliage, flowers and other elements of urban gardens. O’Donnell then constructs images from multiple originals, including photographs layered digitally with his own cold wax paintings. He often layers key photogravure plates onto pigment prints to create variants which change in colour and form as the two layers intersect. The series *A strange appearance – variations*, refers to what philosopher Timothy Morton calls the “strange strangeness” of perception in the age of the Anthropocene. *Queer Saints*, plays with the covering and uncovering of the saint’s body and the collision of the erotic and ecstatic in Christian iconography. Each print takes a particular saint and layers a coupling of old master images together, creating condensed narratives of desire. The *Expulsion* series explores the ongoing political and psychological resonance of the Garden of Eden myth. In 2022 he was awarded 2nd prize in the Jack Wilkins Experimental Photography Prize. He has exhibited at Sydney Contemporary (2024; 2025) and Woolwich Print Fair (2024) and has been a finalist in the Milburn Prize (2023); the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize (2023); the Olive Cotton Award (2023) and the Tacit Still Life Prize (2022). He is actively involved in the printmaking community and is a member of the Baldessin Press & Studio Committee of Management, a not-for-profit access, education and editioning studio.