Eleanor McCaughey
A Sea Change, Into Something Rich and Strange
10th October - 10th November 2024
An exhibition of new works incorporating painting and sculpture by artist Eleanor McCaughey, accompanied by a newly commissioned work by poet Jill Kenny.
McCaughey’s practice explores thematic threads surrounding the body, identity and place, using symbols and metaphors that best express personal narratives. Watery hybrids, drowning dames, flailing females, peace offerings, magnetic moons, brain fog on the horizons and empathic monsters emerge in the work.
McCaughey’s work is continually evolving through research, studio-based experimentation and current reflections on the body through lived experiences of endometriosis, infertility and menopause, out of which her conceptual concerns take shape. Looking at feminist phenomenology of art and form, this work is a personal attempt to express what it is to live in a female body. In the manifestation of this rich and strange world, the ‘woman’ arises in connection with female identity as she takes on multiple forms, as a mermaid, siren, bird, monster and negotiates the boundaries between mortal/divine, Christian/pagan, artificial and biological. Questioning the representation and construction of female social identity.
