Eleanor Suess

The Cube at Scale

2nd July - 31st August 2021

This installation was originally made as a response to the physical artefact of the new version of the 4m2 gallery recently constructed at ASC’s Art House Studios in Croydon. The installed work took the physical artefact of the 4m2 gallery – locally titled “The Cube” – as its starting point, interpreting it as a 1:1 model sitting within the double-height space. Its status as both art object and work of architecture is then echoed in the response, and the works housed within it can be similarly considered to be an art/architecture hybrid. Exhibited in each of the Cube’s four vitrine windows was a different form and scale of architectural model reconstruction of the Cube Gallery itself. Now brought to its sister version in Peckham, the installation becomes a more distant echo of the pavilion gallery in which it was originally housed – rather than referring only to the single instance of the 4m2 gallery in Croydon, the remounting of the installation in Peckham draws the other instances of this exhibition pavilion into focus. 

1:5

This is a 1:5 detailed replica of the version of the 4m2 gallery in ASC’s Art House. In the main window of this 1:5 model sits a 1:5 replica of itself, and within that another replica, and so on until the model is just a few millimetres on each side. This questions what is real, and what is model. In other 1:5 vitrine windows, a series of “exhibits” are housed, which reference Eleanor’s wider practice.  

1:10

This 1:10 model explores light and structure – translucent cladding reveals the timber structure, and the m2 display windows are expanded to form full cubes, constructed out of arrangements of solid acrylic blocks. The bottom lighting makes the model glow, and the acrylic blocks reflect and refract this light.

1:20

This dissected 1:20 model sets up a relationship between solid and void. The open frame element demonstrates the tectonics of the original Cube gallery structure, its symmetry and repetition becoming an abstraction. The plaster cast model “mummifies the voids” (Rachel Whiteread) within the curtilage of the original object – this emphasises the “spire” roof, making a more explicit link back to the structure’s architectural precedent.

1:1

The fourth vitrine contains imagery generated from a 3d digital model at a virtual 1:1 scale. A line perspective of the model with transparent boards has been manually traced onto the glass. From just the right spot the lines give the viewer an “x-ray” view of the full-sized, 1:1 structure.

m2 gallery

All the objects shown here are used in various ways in Eleanor’s expanded practice of artist filmmaking, cyanotype photograms, and installation. Between projects, these objects are normally displayed in Eleanor’s studio, housed in an empty fish-tank which acts as a form of large vitrine. This display re-presents this collection of objects in the m2 vitrine window gallery. Plaster casts of single-use plastic packaging begin to resemble architectural models and are placed adjacent to paper and card models of Eleanor’s studio furniture (including a replica of the fish-tank vitrine). Solid acrylic blocks and hollow cubes act as plinths and vitrines, but also as architectural elements in their own right. 

Eleanor Suess
Eleanor is an artist, architect, and educator. She studied fine art and architecture in Australia and London, recently completing her PhD at Central Saint Martins, and she currently teaches architecture at Kingston School of Art. Eleanor’s practice and writing has been exhibited and published internationally, and she has work in several private collections. As a transdisciplinary practitioner situated between art and architecture, Eleanor explores the nature of architectural representation and the viewer’s spatial and temporal readings of such mediating artefacts. As part of her practice, Eleanor develops expanded forms of architectural representation, combining techniques from various forms of artistic practice and architecture, such as her work exploring temporality and ephemerality through transdisciplinary forms of artists’ digital films, cyanotype photograms, and installation.

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