Communication Design School of Design
Eloise Hodgkinson
My practice explores the intersection of nature, myth and material focusing on how these narratives can be represented through visual language. I engage with dialogues connecting landscape, folklore and art, through walking, collecting and research-led making, I explore how stories, from the ancient to the overlooked, have become embedded in the land and how we in turn, take meaning from natural spaces. I draw on myth, poetry, oral histories and ecological study to create work that sits between archive and information, combining observation with intervention.
Spanning mediums ranging from animation, printmaking, drawing, photography, textile and writing, my work is multi-faceted and diverse, engaging directly with the physicality of material, reflecting the tactile, ephemeral qualities of natural landscapes. I view natural forms not only as subjects of observation but as living archives, carriers of both ecological knowledge and cultural memory. My work often emerges from fieldwork and walking, allowing me to engage directly with the environment and the processes of the landscape.
Whether through visual catalogues, essays or field-based making, my practice aims to trace the entanglements between landscape, story and art.
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The Battle of the Trees
This project is a material-led response to The Battle of the Trees (Cad Goddeu) from The Book of Taliesin. The poem tells a tale of a war, fought by the magician Gywdion, who animates the trees to aid him in battle. It details each tree that joins the battle, describing their attributes and characteristics. Through this project I aimed to form a contemporary interpretation, illustrating the poem over a series of linocuts, printed in a book made up from paperstocks that reflect the characteristics of the species I was depicting. The use of linocut emphasises the poems ancient, incantatory tone, aligning with traditions of handcraft and ritual. I also hand-lettered and bound the book to give it a personal quality, as if an almanac or catalogue created from witnessing the battle.
Project Links
Good For You Leo
For this project I crafted a hand-drawn, mixed medium animation piece to ‘Good For You Leo’ from the Alasdair Gray soundtrack composed by Scott Twynholm for the documentary ‘Alasdair-Gray: A Life in Progress’.
In my piece Gray quotes Leonardo Da Vinci expressing his views on human destruction to the earth and our selfishness in this regard, which Gray goes on to agree with, hence ‘Good For You Leo’. As the track is relatively short, I aimed to have an overarching message instead of a storyline in the animation. My primary and secondary research led to the formation of this message, a discourse around deforestation and the effects of this. Throughout the piece I explore this topic comprehensively, considering the nature of scale through micro and macro forms, while also taking reference from maps, Gray’s works and several artists and animators. My extensive primary research involved taking field trips to forested environments in order to experiment with material and composition, developing my pieces from rough pencil sketches to finished pieces before transforming them into moving image.
The finished animation piece spanned 766 hand-drawn stills which used a large range of mediums: ink, watercolour, acrylic paint, charcoal, pen, pencil and oil pastel.
Project Links
Held by the Path
‘Held by the Path’ explores how we interact with, resonate with and create memories associated with walking, experiencing and archiving landscapes. This project was rooted in a site-specific study of Ardgartan Forest in Argyll Forest Park and resulted in a comprehensive publication that detailed my entire experience surrounding the environment.
I visited the site on multiple occasions, each time walking the paths, forests and beaches, slowly building up an extensive body of work that spanned multiple mediums. I explored historical records and maps to contextualise the location, mapped my journeys to and from, sketched and photographed the environment, used field research books to create small-scale bio-inventories of species I observed, created writings and produced works away from the location such as stitched and knitted pieces and printing works such as etchings. Overall, this book became a very personal project, pursuing the aspects I enjoy as an artist and in my life, aiming to express this emotion and memory of my experiences through the work and through the final publication.
