Orr’s work centers on issues of the psycho-social and environmental where she draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment be it country or urban locales. Orr’s early iconic work Bleeding Trees has led to commissions such as Marriage of the Bride to Art, Raising the Spirits, Exhume the Grave, Hunger, The Myer Windows, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Goya and Ash, to name only a few works which have contributed to the contemporary cultural landscape. Orr grapples with the balance and discord that exists at the heart of relations between the human spirit, art and nature.
In 2004, Jill Orr created From the Sea about the wild shipwreck coastline of Warrnambool. This panoramic video installation was in created in collaboration with the Gunditmara Aboriginal Community from Warrnambool. From the Sea began a body of work that traces overlapping histories of indigenous and non- indigenous relations to place.
She has recently completed The Crossing, which was presented for the 2007 & 8 Mildura and Wentworth Festival.
Orr`s most recent work, The Southern Cross- to bear and behold and Faith in a Faithless Land continues to express cultural and environmental interdependence.
