Maria-Cristina Onea

About

Maria-Cristina Onea

Multidisciplinary Artist | London-based

Maria-Cristina Onea’s practice unfolds at the intersection of analogue photography, moving image, sound and sculpture, navigating the porous boundaries between memory, materiality and embodiment. Rooted in experimental processes such as camera fabrication, film manipulation and sound instrument construction, her work channels a deeply personal inquiry into themes of migration, belonging and transcendence. Drawing from her Scottish-Romanian heritage, Onea’s lens adopts an almost anthropological stance, capturing intimate familial narratives that resonate with broader environmental and existential concerns.

Recent exhibitions include Rencontres d’Arles 2025, Peckham Safehouse and Brompton Cemetery Chapel, marking significant moments in the ongoing evolution of her practice. Now part of the Off-RCA collective, Onea continues to expand the scope of her work within experimental and interdisciplinary frameworks.

Not All Birds Have Feathers

Not All Birds Have Feathers is an intimate meditation on humanity’s enduring fascination with flight, exploring the delicate space between reverence and conquest, emulation and domination. Rooted in Maria-Cristina Onea’s own histories of migration and belonging, the project unfolds as a visual and sonic investigation into the fragile boundaries between organic flight and mechanical mimicry, freedom and the weight of ambition.

During 2025, Maria travelled across France, the UK and Denmark, collaborating with falconers in Scotland and France to capture birds of prey in full, graceful flight against rural and coastal landscapes. In stark contrast, she also documented aircraft fire training sites in France, landscapes scarred by the charred remains of decommissioned planes. These places, both functional and symbolic, serve as haunting monuments to the fantasies and failures of flight.

The work has developed through several presentations. Its original form at the RCA Degree Show was a multisensory installation featuring dual-channel slide projections with three synchronised carousels and an immersive soundscape layered with field recordings of flight and flame. Maria scored over these recordings using modular synthesisers to mimic the sound of engines, adding a layer of sonic mimicry that deepens the project’s core tension: planes copy birds, and she copies the planes.

She collaborated with  software developer (Zac Miller-Waugh) to create sound-reactive Arduino microcontrollers operating via radio frequency, which controlled the movement of the carousels in real time. The slides were both responsive and deliberately disrupted by coded glitches, introducing moments of failure and interruption that echo the uneasy dialogue between technology and nature present throughout the work.

Since then, Not All Birds Have Feathers has been shown in pared-back forms, including a single carousel projection accompanied by a carefully edited sound piece of Ricky Nelsons’ Lonesome Town’, and as a static exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles 2025. There, selected images were printed in liquid emulsion on repurposed stainless steel sheets. This material choice transforms the ephemeral nature of projection into enduring, sculptural artefacts. The steel prints, alongside silver gelatin photographs on fibre-based paper, articulate the paradox of flight: its beauty and mystery, its myth and machinery.

At its core, this work is a meditation on humanity’s relentless desire to escape, to transcend, to dominate the skies—and the paradox that in seeking to become more like birds, we have often estranged ourselves further from nature. It’s both a celebration and a lament, a visual poem on the beauty, mystery, and complexity of flight, and a reflection on the cost of ambition.