Collection: Eleanor Hall

@eleanorhall3160

eleanorhall.com

My work is about my feeling for place. For me, now, this place is where I swim and walk most days: the headlands, heathlands and ocean of Gadigal, Bidjigal and Birrabirragal country in Eastern Sydney. It is a place with associations of deep time that has salved traumas for me and holds many of my most joyous memories.

Using a mix of painting and printmaking processes, some of which mimic the forces of the natural world, I seek to convey the rhythms, colours, forms and patterns that I see and feel as I move within this place.

The viewer will not be able to identify the place but will, I hope, feel a sense of something familiar, if a little disorienting.

As an ocean swimmer, I am often underneath the water. Here, I see the landscape from a moving viewpoint above a world with no horizon and my abstracted works challenge the traditional western landscape concepts of a stable horizon and linear perspective. The western tradition fixes the viewer in space and time. However even when we’re not in the ocean, we don’t see the world from a static perspective; we are constantly looking around and shifting our viewpoint. As I’m walking in the Australian bush, my gaze shifts from soaring cliffs to the lichen patterns on rocks beneath my feet, from sun dappling shadows on tree trunks to pebbles in burbling creeks.

My concerns about the impact of humans on the planet have led me to further question the anthropocentric underpinnings of western concepts of space and time. Instead, I am drawn to Indigenous and Eastern ideas of circular time and of human embodiment in the land and water rather than separation from it.