Spotlight: Eleanor Farley

Hello!  It's Tuesday night, and I'm super tired, but I'm trying to keep up with my schedule and write a new post every weekday!  Therefore, I bring you a Spotlight on the work of my friend Eleanor Farley.  Eleanor is currently a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The image above is of a brand-new piece of hers, in her studio.  Eleanor and I talked last year about her work for a blog I had to write for my Contemporary Art class.  Eleanor told me that her work is about "personalization of mass produced objects, making a home, what we need v.s. what we think we need, and inside/outside."

And these concepts are what I got from her work just by looking at it- the idea of building a home, the idea of home and how can you mass produce a home when the notion of home is such a weighted, nostalgic, complicated, symbolic thing- how can you really define "home," what things make up or consist of "home"- you can define "house" as a building where people live, but the notion of "home" is an altogether different thing.  What's great about Eleanor's work is that "home" is not one thing or one phrase or even a phrase at all, but a litany of experiences, memories, tender moments, "domestic affections," structures and material culture, which culminate over time and take on this word "home" which resides in a very special place in our heart, whether we are conflicted about our home or not.

You can check out more of Eleanor's work on her blog, egfarley.blogspot.com!