Eleanor McLean

The London Art Bar
300 High Holborn, London WC1V 7JH

Temporary Dwelling is a sculptural and sound installation by artists and sisters Eleanor McLean and Melissa McLean. The show explores the public and private spaces that anchor our sense of comfort and familiarity, and the ways these are shaped by culture, upbringing, memory and ritual.…. [Read full Press Release here]

The session involved creating visual collages using materials from the provided archival collection of magazines, coloured paper and newspapers, whilst incorporating found text to construct a poem through pure spontaneity and chance.

This approach was inspired by the art movement ‘Dadaism’ founded in 1916, where artists embraced chance, absurdity and play to create nonsensical artworks, poetry and performances. Emerging from the devastating events of World War I, Dada rejected traditional artistic methods and conventional ideas of rationalism and instead experimented with notions of absurdity, play and the unpredictable.

Participants were asked to act intuitively and playfully to allow unexpected combinations and connections to emerge with the materials. The session explored how chance can be a creative tool to make something new and the importance of lowering creative inhibitions

Photography by Jan Hlavicka.