Eleanor McGough, originally from the Pacific Northwest, maintains a studio in Northeast Minneapolis. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and also studied in Brighton, England on scholarship. She is the recipient of two Minnesota State Arts Board grant awards as well as a Bemis Foundation Residency. McGough’s work and process is represented by Veronique Wantz Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, and was featured in a segment on the Twin Cities Public Television arts program, MN Original, in 2013. Her work is informed by a lifelong interest in biology, particularly of plants and insects, and her influences include Ernst Haeckel, Maria Sybilla Merian, Hudson River School landscapes, Japanese woodblock prints, textile patterns, traditional Asian scrolls, as well as topographical and aerial maps.

Artist Statement 

My paintings explore our fleeting place in the larger patterns of weather, migrations, motion, and time. Imagined hybrid life forms inhabit terrestrial, aquatic, or atmospheric spaces, revealing a fragile and tenuous relationship within these systems. I am drawn to the research of high altitude entomology that details the astonishing fact that billions of insects are carried in air drafts through the layers of our atmosphere. This idea serves as a visual metaphor to the broader context that all life is transitory and swept up in vast currents of energy. Commingling information from biology, textiles, maps, and geometry I work with layers of illusionary depth in combination with flat pattern. The result is a merging of landscape and microscopic slide. The images convey broad movement when viewed at a distance and reveal tiny microscopic worlds upon closer investigation. Small grids punctuate the surfaces as islands of logic interrupting areas of chaos. Like geometry, DNA, or digital pixels, these minuscule grids speak of the endless iteration of tiny structures that comprise our universe. I use repetition of forms to create a sense of motion sequentially and directionally, while the pouring and splashing of paint is an attempt to allow the materials to behave like events of weather. I want the echoes of my process to create the illusion of ephemeral forms caught in the momentum of vast motion.

Explore more of Eleanor’s work at https://www.eleanormcgough.com/