Unsettling and dreamlike, Eleanor Moreton 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 unmistakeable 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.
Moreton’s dark figurative paintings are just as easily read as psychological meditations as they are florid interpretations of 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. “I recognize that I am fascinated by what in previous eras would have been called Evil and by those who get pulled into its orbit. Hence paintings about Charles Manson, murderers, Bluebeard, Josef Fritzl. I am interested in sexuality and repression, masculinity, and femininity. Whilst there is a strong psychological component in my work, I don’t take one theoretical position. In fact, my work is an attempt to get away from theoretical positions. Painting for me has been about moving the activities of the mind into the body.”
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 Wadewose, 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.