De_coding paintings

De-coding paintings aim not only to speak to present-day urgencies but also to engage with the condition of contemporary painting itself. One of the most pressing questions for painters today is how to respond to the rapid onset and proliferation of digital, image-based technologies. In this context, my work offers a gesture toward that question—attempting to remain relevant, or at the very least to make a record of the conditions in which it is made.

"…we live in the wake not only of modernist painting and sculpture but of postmodernist deconstructions of these forms… in the wake not only of the prewar avant-gardes but of the postwar neo-avant-gardes as well. […] What comes after these ends?"

Drawing on Hal Foster's reference, contemporary painting can be understood as operating within systems of feedback, circulation, and exchange rather than as a fixed or isolated object. In this expanded context, painting responds to the influence of screens, digital image environments, and shifting modes of perception—where colour moves between pigment and emissive display and meaning emerges through interaction with viewers and site. Positioned within these networks, painting functions as an open and responsive structure—embedded within technological, spatial, and social systems that continue to shape how images are produced, encountered, and understood today.

Painting series, De-Coding Paintings, MO'D 2025.

Referencing systems theory, the artwork aims to operate within structures of communication rather than as a fixed, autonomous object. Meaning emerges through relationships between site, viewer, image, and display—where distinctions are produced through positioning, colour coding, and spatial arrangement. Within this framework, painting and installation function as embedded systems, responsive to their environments and shaped through processes of circulation, encounter, and interpretation.

Tower of Creative Data
"Systems are not composed of things, but of relations between operations."

Tower of Creative Data:

Tower of Creative Data, 2025. Side view.
Tower of Creative Data, 2025. Front view.
Details from 'De_Coding Paintings.
Above and below: Details from [...]
De_Coding 'Creative Data' Painting, Melissa O'Donnell 2025.
Studio, 2025. Research and process development towards De-Coding Paintings series.
De_Coding 'No_Notice Board' Painting, Melissa O'Donnell 2025.
Detail from De_Coding 'No_Notice Board' Painting

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Modular Painting

Insider / Outsider

Embedded Art Practice