Eleanor Macnair's approach to her photographic process is playful and inquisitive. Taking both iconic and lesser-known photographs and reconstructing them out of Play-Doh, she pares the original images down to their most simple forms and colours. The act of studying and recreating these two-dimensional images into a colourful sculpture form out of Play-Doh allows the artist the opportunity to slow down the act of viewing and to really examine the image, a challenge she also sets for those viewers who encounter her work.
The project, titled Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh, started on a whim in 2013 following a photo pub quiz in Brighton. One of the rounds was to make a reproduction of a famous photograph using Play-Doh. Ever since this fateful evening, Macnair has continued to transform both well-known and obscure photographs by overlooked photographers into three-dimensional interpretations rendered in Play-Doh.
Her project Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh was published in book form in 2014 by MacDonaldStrand/Photomonitor and featured in the Observer's Best Photography Books of 2014. It has also been exhibited at Atlas Gallery, London; Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden and Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The project was included in the Works Programme at Look3 festival 2015, Charlottesville curated by Scott Thode and Kathy Ryan of The New York Times. Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh has also been featured by The Observer Magazine, The Guardian, The Telegraph, BBC News, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, Elephant magazine, Magnum Photos and It's Nice That - amongst many others.
Eleanor Macnair lives and works in London, United Kingdom.