A Light Left On

About

A LIGHT LEFT ON is a painterly installation created on site for The Foundry Gallery. Acting as a satellite space from her Kent studio she has dressed the gallery space like a film or theatre set with furniture and plants that reference ‘home’ and in the centre she has placed a still life. These chosen elements from her personal history have been interwoven into a layered painterly environment which we are tempted into.

A LIGHT LEFT ON hovers in the gaps between painting and installation whilst exploring the theatrical nature of painting itself.  “We live our lives in domestic spaces, I want to disrupt the spatial qualities found in paintings and to investigate the psychology and subject of enduring domesticity.” (Eleanor Watson, 2022) A Large canvas has been lent against the wall; paintings spill out of the frame onto the opposite wall, their ephemermal gestural marks adding to the exhibition’s layers. Two free-standing mirrors, have been positioned at angles to each other, operating as visual devices, creating multiple perspectives that reflect the painted surfaces and our image onto one another.

A LIGHT LEFT ON is the title of a poem by May Sarton in which a couple return to their shared domestic space to find the light left on, finding themselves reintroduced to their familiar and intensely intimate space.

“In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,” [4]

­Eleanor wants us the viewer to feel invited into an intimate space of her making and for a moment be taken aback by what we encounter. “When you opened the door, you found yourself in the midst of an entire environment.”

Feeling at Home is a complex emotion. In A LIGHT LEFT ON, Eleanor has successfully created a semblance of the familiar and the domestic through her choice of objects and the portrayal of her constructed space through paint and painting. A LIGHT LEFT ON has laid bare Eleanor’s latest artworks and ideas to new interpretations, influences, and connections. Instead of the literal depiction of objects relating to ideas around the subject of ‘Home’, it is Eleanor’s invitation to us. To have both a visceral and an intellectual experience, to find ourselves interwoven in her two and three-dimensional painterly environment where we find the light left on.