A parade of characters: the artist, mothers and daughters, animals, ladies, all travesties, portraits gone-wrong. These characters assert themselves blissfully unaware of their own wrongness. They may be attempts at self-portraiture as I try to pin down a sense of my own shifting identities. Or they may be a species of ghost which haunts us from within, controlling us without our knowing, and reaching the conscious through the images running through the imagination. I'm exploring an uncomfortable relationship between the individual and the world, a discomfort which is also embedded in the artifice of Gainsborough, whose paintings I often use as a starting point. This discomfort is in part attributable to gender (many of my cast are female). This is the discomfort of being neither one thing nor the other, caught between being "woman⁄mother⁄lady⁄daughter" and "the law⁄the tradition of painting". I am attracted to the tradition of painting and its almost depressing weight. At the same time, my work seeks to parody the very paintings I refer to. They are both fond and irreverent - an attempt to cast off that weight.

Showcomplex - Eleanor Moreton: Artist Statement
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