Eleanor Suess

Projective Artefact

November 15th – December 2nd, 2023

Eleanor is an artist and architect whose wider practice spans across a variety of media, including artists’ film, installation, model-making, photography, and cyanotype photograms, exploring the nature of spatial and temporal representation. For Projective Artefacts, Eleanor has included a range of work from the last four years, charting the journey of her experimental work with cyanotype photograms and architectural models.

The cyanotype work uses sunlight as a primary active agent, the sun’s parallel rays constructing images that follow the convention of non-perspectival oblique projection – a true plan is formed from the contact of the objects on the paper, and the parallel solar rays trace the oblique side elevations. The resulting “blueprints” suggest architectural or urban forms; however, the abstract instrumentality of the axonometric drawing type is undermined through the materiality of the process.

The paper and card hand-made physical models create small spaces, which project full-sized versions of themselves via the viewer’s active imagination. A replica of the gallery space itself draws into question ideas of what is real and what is representational. Secondary exhibitions take place within the models, affording these small spaces a powerful agency of their own.

Eleanor’s transdisciplinary practice responds to her dual grounding in art and architecture and is fundamentally process driven. A creative practice-led research methodology enables her to bring together performative practice and theoretical understanding from both of her foundational disciplines. This iterative and reflective critical practice enables thinking through making, allowing the evolving work to speak back to inform the continued development of the practice.