Eleanor Anderson: Irregular Around the Margins

Eleanor Anderson

Irregular Around the Margins

June 15 – July 27, 2024 

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 15th from 5–8pm

Artist Talk: Monday, July 1st at 6pm

Irregular Around the Margins, a show of new works by Eleanor Anderson upcoming at Abattoir Gallery, features large scale felt and fabric collages that are materially intricate – beads, ropes, bags, and balls protrude from saturated industrial felt into the 2.5 dimension, connected through hand and machine embroidery. Frayed edges contrast against the smooth canvas of felt, each texture becoming an assertive design element. Anderson pits intricately crafted moments against sculptural gestures, creating pieces that initially read as overall compositions but challenge the viewer to a game of eye spy.

In her first solo show for the gallery, artist Eleanor Anderson presents new works that hold the wall while beckoning to be touched, draped, and generally incorporated into our daily sensory experience. Using materials, both new and found, she creates pieces that present as both objects and paintings, occupying a theatrical proscenium between stage and audience. Serious play, from Froebel and Montessori kindergarten tenets, operates at an intentionally high level here. Color, texture, and weight are deftly organized as layered collages, using thick industrial felt in saturated tones as base layers for an array of beads, blocks, knitted, stitched and sewn trimmings. But, when experiencing these pieces in concert in the gallery, the individual materials and processes outlined above recede, giving precedence to pure color structured forms of varied weights, depths and musical movement.

Anderson’s textile work has progressed markedly from pictorial stitched works, the Cartography series, for example, and material objects—the rope pieces, and the flatweave New England rugs—into a sophisticated blend of all her explorations of material history, formalist art history, and collage aesthetics. Channeling forebearers who worked textiles into sculpture and paintings, including Alan Shields and Harmony Hammond, she continues to find ways to keep her materials engaged with both art and craft.  What emerges here is an individual language that occupies the shape shifting ground of something new with the promise of more to come. 

Anderson was born in Cleveland and attended Colorado College, obtaining her BA in Studio Art in 2012. She then received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2022. Anderson exhibited with Abattoir at Feria Material in Mexico City in 2024 and recently completed an invitational residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington. She has exhibited throughout the United States and his is her first solo show with the Cleveland gallery. 

Please join us on Monday, July 1st at 6pm as Eleanor Anderson and Jessica Pinsky, Founder and Executive Director of Praxis Fiber Workshop, discuss Anderson's current exhibition at the gallery, Irregular Around the Margins, along with new directions in Fiber Arts