Elinor O'Donovan
Elinor O’Donovan (she/her) (*1995) is a visual artist based in Cork, Ireland, working with film, installation, digital collage, and sculpture to create playful and speculative answers to questions about knowledge, memory, and truth. Using pop culture references and familiar tropes, O’Donovan creates humorous works that often blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, exploring how cultural narratives shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
By examining how micro-details reveal macro-narratives and testing the disjunctive relationships between symbols and imagery, O’Donovan creates glimpses of speculative worlds where things might be different. An aesthetic of neoteny, typified by unresolved or juvenile forms, characterises her presentations, with sculptures propped on tripods, playful collages loosely fixed with masking tape, and sketchy drawings. This approach embraces indecision and uncertainty as an inevitable response to a fragmented, hyper-connected world.
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.). Recent commissions include projects for the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Midsummer Festival, and the National Sculpture Factory. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Golden Fleece Award.
elinorodonovan.com | @elinorodonovan