about
Eleanor has been involved in the textile arts field including embroidery for most of her life in some way or another, even as she is also a painter and drawer, this informs her textile work. She thinks in cloth and thread combinations as they relate to drawing.
For many years Eleanor was doing variations on sewing machine or free-motion embroidery. She has been developing techniques in hand embroidery to create portraits and portrait commissions. More rerecently Eleanor has been developing techniques in textile narratives that allow for a dimensional surface that enhances the viewers experience of the stories she is telling. She is also trying out unexpected compositional elements including speech bubbles.
She has a BFA from the University of Manitoba and has exhibited work both as a drawer and painter and as an artist working in textiles in many locations in Canada and in the UK.
Teaching is an essential part of her creative purpose.
artist statement
I like to say that drawing is my life: “not a day without line” either just looking and seeing, through drawing or embroidery thread.
I have time in my life now to really bring the skills of drawing to my embroidery work. Along with an odder sense of arrangement and order, allowing unplanned images and ideas to appear and reappear. I incorporate the narrative in my most recent textiles, a way of ‘reading’ the surface sometimes from left to right or up to down like a graphic novel, sometimes through the strategic placement of silkscreened text on moody backgrounds.
