Elinor O'Donovan

Cork-based artist Elinor O'Donovan completed a BA in Intermedia Arts at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland in 2019. Her work is primarily concerned with play, and she exuberantly explores how stories inform worldviews, and the ways in which popular culture influences memory and knowledge and the blurred line between fact and fiction.

The work makes frequent reference to internet memes, cartoons, and film and TV tropes. She often chooses an aesthetic of ‘neoteny’, a term used in biology to describe the way that creatures evolve to look like infant forms of previous stages in their evolutionary cycles, and which was applied to aesthetics by the writer Jonathan Lethem. The neotenous aesthetic is evident in her sculptures propped up by tripods, sketchy drawings, and playful collages fixed with masking tape. By employing this style she aims to question what use can art be, what influence can it have, and if it is inarticulate and unformed. Leaving things unresolved accepts indecisiveness as an inevitable response to a postmodern world; a world of global capital, hyper-connectivity and hyper-velocity. The practice is characterised by a distinct sense of humour – her current 4-channel dance film work-in-progress ‘Metametamorphosis' sees Gregor Samsa from Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' awaking to find that, instead of a beetle, he has become The Beatles – all four of them. At the same time.

Elinor O'Donovan applied for a Golden Fleece Award in order to invest in new camera equipment that would introduce a greater level of autonomy and skill to the filmmaking aspect of her practice, and to fund the completion of an ambitious self-initiated short film.