Eleanor Powell

London and Wiltshire based multi-media artist.

Contact me:

Email: eleanorpowellartist@gmail.com

Insta: @eleanorpowellartist

About the Artist...

In its current form, my work is an investigation into recreating the body. It exists in a contradictory space where the indulgent messiness of physicality and the delicacy of feminine material processes overlap. My practice translates disruptive conversations between myself and my body, twisting and fidgeting in the space between the physical and mental self.

The body in my work is exclusively my body. The making of feminist self-portraiture, and the result, is the deliberate and physical taking up of space. To be the subject and narrator in your work is an assertive feminist act. As Carolee Schneeman exposes in ‘The Obscene Body/Politic’ (1991), ‘WE WHO ARE ADDRESSING THE TABOOS BECOME THE TABOO. THE SUPPRESSORS ARE CONFUSED. THEY CANNOT DISTINGUISH IMAGES FROM THE IMAGE MAKER’.

The act of feminist self-portraiture, as it operates in my practice, is a transforming of the obscenities of the body into something new and bizarre and mystical and illogical. Adopting this process in my practice allows me to translate the language of my body; to rupture its boundaries. In the provocative dismissal of biological structures of the body, most prevalent in my negotiations with images depicting pain, I have developed a set of arguably contradictory rules:

The visual references of pain are always mine

The pain itself always pre-exists the making process.

In the aforementioned quote from Schneeman, she calls attention to who is handling the spectrum of representations of female and non-cis gendered pain and demands a restructuring to this imbalance of power. My process acts alongside these confrontations.

I embrace the role of the monster in my work, abstracting myself into something dark and enigmatic. I revel in a language cultivated from feminine expressions that resist androcentric structures. I slip my physicality into places it shouldn’t belong. My work is a scab, layered with delicate embroidered lines wrought into a hand drawn interpretation cast onto digital landscapes, manifested in the pixel stains of projections onto fabrics.

However, the vulnerability of my work has caused me to be difficult about the boundaries between my own body and my art form. In my site-specific sculpture The Synapse and the Nest (December 2023), the textiles are images of my own skin printed onto poly-georgette. Yet, when the fabric is stretched onto its wire skeletal form, its features are deliberately magnified beyond its decernible qualities. I have found a nervousness where the abstraction of my figure falls away. In the re-making of the body, I am confronted with my real untempered physicality and the urge to self-censor is often difficult to resist. This is the process of translating the self into a made artwork, making the body not only monstrous but creating a place for the made self to hide.

Contradictorily, during the making process, the boundary between materiality and my corporeal body is one I choose to disturb as little as possible. Therefore, when handling textiles, I make the decision to hand-stitch each element, despite the process being fiddly and irritating. This helps to maintain this link between myself and my work after my body has been through the process of abjection and abstraction. It is a way of holding a little control over my work once it is exhibited. Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters (2023) describes this conflicting methodology as ‘the art monster’s job… to refuse to be silenced, but also to find a material which tells the stories of her body’ (Elkin, 2023, pg. 73).

This is something that journeyed into my piece Bertha (March 2024). Taking its name from the character Bertha Rochester from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), this piece is an ode to the villainized ‘mad women’ in art, film and literature. Here, the body is abstracted and restructured in the layers between the physical, made objects and a digital landscape. Against each other they create the illusion of a figure, broken apart and disassembled, sitting on a chair which exists both as a made object and a digital one. Here the body makes the choice to reside in the non-corporeal space, repelling structures of the biological body, the conditions of physical space, both those of domesticity and the art world, and choosing unruliness.

As I leave art school, I choose to represent my body as dismembered, both through the amalgamation of its interior and exterior and as via the restrained and extended versions of itself. Ultimately, my work uses self portraiture to take apart the body to take up space it is owed.