Artist Name: Elinor O’Donovan
Residency Dates: November 2024
Born: 1995
Hometown: Cork, Ireland
Lives & Works: Cork, Ireland
URL: elinorodonovan.com| Instagram: @elinorodonovan
Education: 2019 | BA in Intermedia Art, Edinburgh College of Art, UK
Bio/Statement:
Elinor O’Donovan is a visual artist based in Cork, Ireland, employing film, installation, digital collage, and sculpture to craft playful responses to questions about knowledge, memory, and truth.
Central to her work is the often-repeated capitalist-realist truism, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism.” Through the use of humor and a broad (and sometimes dissonant) repertoire of cultural references, she seeks to challenge the things generally accepted as “the world.” By examining how micro-details point to macro-narratives and by exploring the strange and disjunctive relationships between symbols and imagery, she aims to create glimpses of speculative realities—”worlds” where things might be different.
In her presentations, O’Donovan often adopts an aesthetic of ‘neoteny’ or a willingness to leave work unresolved. The term ‘neoteny’ in biology describes how animals evolve to resemble the infant forms of their evolutionary predecessors. This neotenous aesthetic is evident in her sculptures propped up by tripods, quick sketchy drawings, and playful digital collages fixed with masking tape. Leaving things unresolved embraces indecisiveness as an inevitable response to a postmodern world, shaped by global capital flows, hyper-connectivity through digital media, and hyper-velocity.
Elinor O’Donovan completed her BA in Intermedia Art at Edinburgh College of Art in 2019. Since then, she has exhibited in solo and group shows in Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Italy, and Mexico. Notable solo shows include GeneratorProjects in Dundee (2023); Sample-Studios at the Lord Mayor’s Pavilion in Fitzgerald’s Park, Cork (2021); and 126 Gallery in Galway (2021). She has also received numerous accolades in Ireland, including being shortlisted for the 2024 Golden Fleece Award, a commission from the National Sculpture Factory and Cork City Council for a major work in 2024, the 2024 Cork Midsummer Festival Jane Anne Rothwell Award, the inaugural Cork International Film Festival Commission Award in 2021, and four Visual Art bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland between 2024 and 2021. She is the current elected secretary of Praxis: The Artists’ Union of Ireland.
Support: Elinor O’Donovan’s residency is made possible with support from the Arts Council of Ireland.
