Gill Ord's work has moved from formal abstraction which often used photography as source, to incorporating the photographic images themselves as an integral part of the final object. Using heat transfer techniques, Ord transposes a photographic image (either taken by herself or found) onto canvas where it becomes both ground and subject of the piece. Onto this Ord introduces a series of painterly interventions - often amoeba like shapes or dots which either float above or within the pictorial space of the original. At times these marks join the narrative of the underlying image in playful mimicry, at others they operate against the story line, interfering with the pictorial motif and insisting on a formal relationship of colours and tensions. Invading and sometimes all but obliterating the image, the marks often crowd together at the foreground of the picture or hover above a landscape like a net - precisely demarcating the picture plane.

In manipulating and subverting these photographic sources Ord explores connections to things seen, felt, and remembered without taking up figuration per se. The photographs become a key to the autobiographical and visual experiences that have made her; The found photographs become carriers, signifiers of the empirical world.