Co-existence, 70 x 80cm. 2025.
Daniel O’Toole
Multimedia artist
Naarm (Melbourne, Australia)
I’m interested in how we experience the world through shifting layers of colour, light, sound, and spatial perception. Much of my work begins as a way to make sense of my own sensory reality, to translate subtle internal impressions into something physical that others can encounter. I use abstraction as a language for this, a way of mapping perception rather than illustrating it.
My practice moves between painting, photography, video, sound, and installation. I’m drawn to materials that bend or distort light such as frosted acrylic, mirror surfaces, and aluminium structures, and to the way these elements can create optical events that only fully reveal themselves through movement. The works are often quiet at first glance, but they reward slowing down, looking longer, and letting your own perception shift with the work.
The Refraction Painting series grew from this fascination with light behaving unpredictably. Using layers of frosted acrylic, internal mirrors, and fields of colour, the paintings create small “micro-events”: subtle shifts of shadow, soft diffraction, and edges that seem to multiply or dissolve. These pieces aren’t images so much as responsive environments, situations where looking becomes an embodied experience.
Sound has become another way for me to explore perception in physical terms. In Voices from the Void, a set of resonant brass drums responds to the movement of visitors, creating a shared, almost ritual-like space where sound becomes sculptural and spatial. That same interest in sensory immediacy shapes the Noisy Eyes series, which responds to my experience of Visual Snow Syndrome. Rather than depict it literally, the paintings evoke the pressure, static, rhythm, and intensity of that perceptual state, balancing chaos with moments of stillness.
Across media, I’m trying to build environments that heighten awareness, works that engage perception and invite a more embodied way of looking, listening, and being present.