Eleanor Street

Eleanor is a London-based artist and recent graduate of an MA in Printmaking at UAL Camberwell. She’s a member of both FOLD Art Collective and Critical Edge Collective and shares a studio with 3 fellow printmakers and a painter. Her previous career was as a Civil Servant, mostly at the Department for Culture.

Eleanor’s most recent work uses photographs taken by her father, who died in 2022, as the basis for photopolymer prints on cotton muslin. Taken in the landscape around the tidal basin of Loch Fleet in Scotland, the photographs include a boat wreck and other decaying infrastructure. The process of working with these images and translating them into this form has been an act of obligation – to recognise and capture for posterity a sense of her father outside of his familial role. But there has also been catharsis in the process and a joyful recognition of shared focus and interests.

Eleanor’s work explores memory and emotions, the traces we leave in the landscape and the memories, experiences and objects that we take with us. She uses images of landscape that have personal meaning and the idea of transitional objects to evoke intimate, personal experiences and emotions that also have universal salience. Working mostly in printmaking, but with elements of painting, sculpture and book arts, Eleanor uses images of landscape which skirt the traditional notion of landscape art, focusing on what is underfoot or unseen instead of the scenic ‘sublime’. These images tend to be textural and somewhat ambiguous, though for Eleanor there is a specific meaning or memory associated with each one, with the intention that they will elicit the viewer’s own experiences of landscape, loss, familial history and so on.

Materiality and the haptic are important aspects of Eleanor’s work, with an emphasis on traditional materials that invite handling and manipulation. Through traditional analogue processes, she seeks to crystallise the fleeting and intangible into something tangible, tactile and lasting. She is particularly drawn to images of the surface of moving water, capturing its restless and relentless nature.