Eleanor Mulhearn
Eleanor Mulhearn is a visual artist and academic, bringing image, form and movement into multi-disciplinary spaces. Her use of mediums is diverse, and can include illustration, animation, ceramics and installation. Working with archives, libraries, museums and place, Eleanor engages with under-represented and often overlooked histories, multispecies lives and spaces. From these, she creates works which sit between the factual and the mythic, working both independently and in collaboration with artists, institutions and in workshops, with communities, nationally and internationally.
Explore hybrid figure-making in an Exquisite-Beings workshop, using archival imagery, making, drawing and scrap materials; inspired by our relationships with rivers, their mythologies, histories, present and futures. Once associated with water deities, now rivers and waterways in the UK are heavily polluted, the vast majority privately owned.
Water deities may have been largely forgotten here, but names given to rivers, provide clues to former human relationships with water. Hydrofeminism is a conceptual framework that encourages us to think of our own fluidity, the water that flows through our own bodies, reminding us of connections with other species and other worlds of water, everywhere (Neimanis).
Exquisite-Beings (in contrast to the Surrealist’s Exquisite-Corpse*), looks to arts practice as a means of embodied experience, centred in ecological concern and materials, making together. This workshop will also draw inspiration from practices such as those of Ithell Colquhoun, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varos, who were associated with the Surrealist movement; but more particularly engaged with spiritual societies, folklore, indigenous knowledge and ecological concern. This exploratory workshop will draw from some of these themes and practices, to invent a cast of puppet-beings, from a sea of materials, which honour the water we share, everywhere…
*(the Surrealist practice of blind co-creation of a figure made by drawing on paper, folding and passing it on until a full figure is created, usually in three parts).