TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Dwelling, Being, Clearing a solo exhibition of paintings by London-based artist Eleanor Moreton on view April 14th through May 28th 2023. This body of work echoes ideas from renowned German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s masterpiece monograph: Being and Time.
Moreton writes "The family is back in the wood, its members are going about their tasks. It's a winter wood, so less accommodating and more reflective. It is a family like my own birth family, with a son and a daughter, of a similar era to my own. My sources were illustrations of family life and childhood from that time, illustrations which informed my own childhood and which reflect this need for order, conformity and security. The painting titles are both nouns and verbs: Dwelling, Being, Clearing, Building, reflecting Heidegger's ideas about the intrinsic 'making' nature of human beings."
In the wake of the global catastrophe of World War I, Heidegger rethinks the origins of culture and philosophy by emphasizing our thrownness in the world and how to authentically respond to the situations we find ourselves thrown into. In his most famous writing, Being and Time (1927), he expounds on how mankind often dodges the existential challenge of being true to our being in the world. Heidegger and Moreton comment on this authentic way of being through the act of making. In each of Moreton’s paintings titled “Dwelling”, “Building”, “Clearing”, and “Being”- Moreton’s work depicts figures experiencing the world in full color and texture. These titles speak to the Heidegger’s main point that being is inseparable from time and the world we exist within.
In Dwelling the girl reaches for a Wood Anemone, the Windflower which appears in spring. Animated by spring winds, it takes its name from the word 'anima', Latin for 'soul'. Anima is also, in Jungian psychology, the unconscious feminine. In both Being and Pupae the children handle an over-sized chrysalis, the mysterious transitional developmental stage between caterpillar and butterfly.
In the last Hibernia painting, Gathering, we have moved on a decade and the buildings are now established. The children have grown. The butterflies have emerged. "This is my generation and this image, from the Windsor Free Festival in 1974, reminds me both of that festival and also of my friends at the time."
Moreton’s dark figurative paintings are just as easily read as psychological meditations as they are florid interpretations of philosophy, literature, European history, and psychoanalysis. She is particularly drawn to fairytales and the fictions we create about ourselves individually and collectively. “My work is very closely connected to my inner life,” she says.
Unsettling and dreamlike, she builds fantastic fairy worlds peppered with fabled drama. With the richness of an old world tapestry, her world comes alive on canvas-- weasels bound, ravens lurk, children wander. There is an unmistakable childlike wonder to her brush, underscored by a deeply intellectual longing for something that goes beyond the literal into the literary. “My characters precariously inhabit a world on the edge of the woods, on the edge of their own animal, wild selves and on the edge of the more unruly aspects of their minds,” she says.
Eleanor Moreton studied painting at Exeter and Chelsea Colleges of Art, and Art History and Theory at UCE (University of Central England). Solo exhibitions include Wodewose, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh (2019), A Cold Wind From The Mountains, Exeter Phoenix, Exeter, (2017), Monro Room, The House of St Barnabas, London (2016), California Dreaming, Canal, London (2015), Tales of Love and Darkness (2014) and I See the Bones in the River (2012) at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool and London, the Ladies of Shallott, Jack Hanley Gallery, New York (2012), and Im Wartezimmer, Ceri Hand Gallery, London (2010). Her work has been reviewed in Art Monthly, Art in America, and The Guardian. Her work can be seen in The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting by Matt Price, (Anomie, 2018) and Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins, (Thames and Hudson, 2015). She has participated in art fairs including Frieze Art Fair, London, Art Rotterdam, NADA Miami, The Armory Show, New York, VOLTA, Basel and Manchester Contemporary.