Eleanor Rodwell — Cel del Nord

Eleanor Rodwell is an artist based in Norwich, UK who undertook a residency at Cel del Nord in the summer of 2022. Her work explores the body and its response to both environment and emotional experience; tactile, intimate objects, bodily manifestations and large-scale fabric drawings. She is drawn to the immersive state of automatic, strenuous processes, often working blind and impulsively to express the internal subconscious.

Since the residency, she has held a solo show at oneuppergoat gallery, Norwich (October 2022) where she exhibited the body of work made at Cel Del Nord. Her next residency will take place at Fossekleiva Kultursenter in January 2023.

Why did you make walking the focus of your Cel del Nord residency?

During the pandemic I spent a lot of time walking around Norwich, where I lived. It was a way of clawing back some autonomy over my body, space and time and a way to deal with working-from-home anxiety.

In my work I often convey emotional experience through the body, and immersive drawing states, so the emotional and psychological capacity of walking fitted naturally. I became more interested in how the motion enabled me to tune in to my physicality and the streets of my home, which almost felt like an extension of my body.

When I swapped my urban walking routes for the rural, remote landscape in Oristà, it enabled me to focus on mapping and noticing. I spent a lot of time with myself, often thinking about nothing in particular, or being so absorbed by a strenuous slope that there was no room for thought. I was amazed by how the forms, colours and feelings I collected on my walks slowly and subconsciously appeared in my drawings. It was a strange, almost magical process. I realised walking, like drawing, is just another way of thinking and making sense of the world.

It’s a lovely idea, this idea of the body as a means of making marks across the landscape on a different spatial scale to the drawings you did later.

I know you read books about walking and particularly female walking in preparation. I'm interested in how that literature about the 'state' while walking aligns with your immersive drawing state. It sounds like a type of letting go. Is that how you see it?

Yes. I very much saw my walking, my writing and my drawing as three edges of a triangle; all manifestations of my thinking and my subconscious. All three were immersive, strenuous and purposefully carried out for long periods of time. It’s what made the whole project so liberating.

I’d been looking widely into psychogeography for some time, but ‘Wanderers’ by Kerri Andrews particularly struck a chord with its discussion of female roaming over recent centuries. Each chapter documents a woman whose sense of self was strengthened by walking - writers, governesses and housewives. Similar themes cropped up - walking as a means of autonomy and escape, as a way of remembering lost loved ones, and developing an intricate knowledge of their local landscape. Often, too, the physical strain of walking offered catharsis from emotional struggles. I was surprised - but also not surprised - that I felt all of these things. It gave me a peculiar but lovely kinship with these other female roamers across time.

Eleanor Rodwell’s workspace at Cel del Nord

How did walking feed your drawings?

Walking alone for all those hours and allowing my mind to wander between big things, mundane things and pure sensory stimulation primed me for drawing in the afternoon. Maybe also, being physically and mentally tired allowed me to really let go, to make marks automatically and see what rose to the surface.

Giving away control is probably the most important part of my process; I don’t crave it or the same step-by-step practical method. Closing my eyes and letting the charcoal just go ensures honesty, enabling me to learn something about myself. It isn’t always easy but always feels worthwhile.

Breakthroughs are often unexpected, aren't they?

Absolutely. Quite regularly, I’ll be bumbling along making some alright work, and it’ll take a moment of tiredness or frustration or strain for something to click and the piece transforms. For the duration of this residency, I was pleased with the drawings I’d been creating. They ticked all the boxes, accurately expressing what had been swimming around in my head whilst walking. However, they still lacked a definite development from my previous work. It was pretty frustrating, especially when I tried to force a shift by introducing a new colour, and it didn’t work.

On the penultimate day of the project, I pushed myself to do one last drawing despite being physically and mentally drained, hungry, and covered in charcoal. I lazily added a pale hot blue, and suddenly everything sang; a new colour combination that perfectly responded to the dusty hillsides, alongside forms that straddled stretched limbs and mountainous rock formations. I made a further eight drawings the next day, all more dynamic and honest after that.

Do your colours stay with you between projects? I'm wondering if the pale hot blue belongs to the work you made here, or if it will appear again in the next places you visit with your drawings.

I tend to use the same colour palette across my work instinctively, as a natural part of my drawing language.. In general though, I’m drawn to warm colours: golden ochre, burnt brown, blood red, bruise-like mauve/burgundy. Earthy, bodily, human hues. They feel organic, with my subject matter and process being so wrapped up in the body.

Each colour also has a personal symbolism, relaying to different emotional states. Red alludes to anger, panic, being overwhelmed. Burnt brown a heavy, human maternity. Yellow is hope, safety, rescue. Mauve is dissociative, calm but also threatening. This key is one of the few things I use to guide my drawing, but only as a prompt. I may be remembering a certain experience and naturally pick up the brown pastel, but I have no idea what I’ll do with it. Then my mind will move on to yellow and things will quickly change. It’s hugely responsive and automatic – I didn’t realise how I was using these colours so repetitively and stubbornly for a long time.

This palette feels like an extension of my most vulnerable, sincere inner world. But I was keen to see a development, which is why I tried to force the blue – unsuccessfully at first. When I stopped trying, it slotted into place. The pale blue reflected that hot sky, but also the bright cornflower-like flowers along the tracks, and the turquoise butterflies and damselflies that glittered around the river. It was wonderful to see all that sensory information filter through to my work, but I’m not sure if it’ll appear in future drawings. It was landscape and experience specific, unlike my general palette which feels part of my being. But who knows! If it feels natural I’ll pick that blue pastel back up.

Hot blue breakthrough shows in drawings - pastel, charcoal and paint used on calico.

Will this body of work have a clear end point, or will it continue to evolve and change continuously? What are your art plans for the next couple of months?

The drawings were specific to the place and my walks so I don’t think I’ll be adding to them, but I will continue exploring the way I made the work. Moving beyond the purely internal and emotional has allowed me to focus on physicality and how the body relates to an external space. It’s made me interested in the interplay between movement, contemplation and automatism, and only increased my fascination with the subconscious. I have plans to roam around my local landscape in the same way, and I can’t wait to see the different responses.

I’ve got quite a few residencies planned for the new year, both internationally (at Fossekleiva Kultursenter in Oslo) and closer to home in East Anglia. I’m very excited about the new work these will nurture, and the opportunity to meet new creatives. I’m also organising a large group show next March, with my close friend and printmaker Georgia Green, at The Shoe Factory in Norwich. We’re aiming to champion the local art scene, showcasing East-Anglian artists from across generations, rural/urban localities, and from a range of art education backgrounds. For now however, I’m spending as much time as possible making. Alongside drawing, I’ve recently enjoyed returning to casting - encouraged by my current job in a small artist’s bronze foundry. Seeing (and feeling) the detail of a thumbprint in solid bronze is captivating, and I’ve become hooked on combining that human fragility with such a permanent, unforgiving material.