Eileen White
Eileen White works within the expanded field of print, site-specific installations and artist books to explore and make visible her experience of being in a specific landscape, alongside an awareness of our entanglements to place, history, temporality and our impact on nature. Essentially this means taking time to create work using an ethical and caring framework. As such, she researches alternative ways to think about her relationship with the Earth that is less environmentally destructive, by using slow, repetitive, low-tech, analogue print and photographic processes. Her interest in the hand-made is almost ritualistic, and her work often has a hushed, delicate presence.
Eileen refers to her work as ‘hauntings’, personal collections of visual mappings and careful chartings of what is in transience. Her work interweaves an embodied methodology that is often uncalibrated, such as homemade cameras, historical photographic techniques, plant-based alternative chemicals as well as recycling waste materials and gardening. This creates a different way of image-making that isn’t purely representational, but instead enables her to gain a more grounded, intrinsic understanding of the landscape she observes and interprets. This naturally extends itself to managing any waste and becomes a form of performative activism. The resulting work aims to entice the viewer into another world; to create both a connection and a longing to know more, as well as new forms of attention, sensitivity and thought.
Eileen recently took part in a residency at the Chelsea Physic Garden, a four-acre site on the banks of the River Thames in London, which was established 350 years ago by Apothecaries as a place to grow medicinal plants. This opportunity has enabled Eileen to take a botanical journey through deep time, both historically, scientifically and seasonally. Exploring an exterior landscape through interior space using alternative plant-based chemicals in the darkroom, recycling waste and processes such as historical glass-plate photography, phytography as well as electron microscope scanning technology, has highlighted the reciprocal and collaborative relationship between herself and nature's agency. Through these nuanced and patient processes. Eileen works with the plants, not only imprinting their images but facilitating an ongoingness through her acts of recycling and gardening, creating new forms of attention, sensitivity and narratives with regard to the urgency that exists in the Anthropocene of how to live in harmony with the Earth.
A Hampshire-based visual artist, Eileen received her BA in Fine Art Textiles from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Print at the Royal College of Art, London. Eileen has exhibited work internationally and worked with a variety of heritage organisations such as English Heritage and The National Trust, as well as private museums and galleries. She has worked in the education sector as a lecturer and teacher as well as facilitating many workshops. She is an active member of The Sustainable Darkroom, The London Alternative Photographic Collective, and The Kiln Photographic Studio.