"Full House" Tapestry

Title: Full House: from the ‘Players’ series 

Techniques and Materials:  Silkscreen, block print, hand dyeing with Procion MX Dyes, applique, sewing machine and hand embroidery and digital print on raw canvas. 
Every piece of fabric is handmade. No commercial fabrics used. 

Size: 19W X 27H inches, 48W X 68.3H cms 

Artist Statement: These portraits are created by building or layering cut pieces or fragments of silkscreened and embroidered features, to allow a face to emerge. I have fun with it; sometimes funny things happen, and I go with it like an ear stands in for an eye. 
The portraits are formally frontal and lusciously layered with fabrics and impressions of jewels, these portrait layouts are whimsical and creatively stimulating to do, their expressions often surprise me. These portraits are all ‘players’, they have something they are manipulating in an orderly way on the marble-like tabletop at which they sit. They are formal and yet funny. There is skewing of perspectives too as if the playing field is farther away or below the main frontal face which hovers above. 

Artist Bio:

Eleanor has been involved in the textile arts field including embroidery for most of her life in some way or another, even as she is also a painter and drawer, this informs her textile work. She thinks in cloth and thread combinations as they relate to drawing.
For many years Eleanor was doing variations on sewing machine or free-motion embroidery. She has been developing techniques in hand embroidery to create portraits and portrait commissions. More rerecently Eleanor has been developing techniques in textile narratives that allow for a dimensional surface that enhances the viewers experience of the stories she is telling. She is also trying out unexpected compositional elements including speech bubbles.
She has a BFA from the University of Manitoba and has exhibited work both as a drawer and painter and as an artist working in textiles in many locations in Canada and in the UK.