eleanormahinthorp@gmail.com

Rooted in childhood observations of mining industries and Persian animistic traditions, my work examines how landscapes are abstracted, reimagined, and inscribed through extraction, mythology, and mana. Through site visits, I document geological formations in highly charged locations—mines, former battlefields, sites of preservation, geological anomalies, and landscapes embedded with local lore and historical disruption.

My large-scale paintings engage directly with the physicality of stone, emulating its weight, texture, and material presence. By layering pigment, mineral matter, and surface disruptions, I co-create with the subject itself, reconstructing strata and surfaces informed by photographs, small paintings, and drawings made on-site. This process functions as both an act of preservation and transformation, mirroring the ways in which geological formations record time.

While my paintings maintain a close resemblance to the stones I study, they emphasize numeric patterns, symbolic and linguistic fragments, and formal distortions that interrogate how the earth has shaped human culture, life, and language. Conversely, I examine human interventions—abstraction, extraction, and imposed rupture—that disrupt the geological and animistic record. This inquiry is deeply influenced by Iranian fortune-telling practices passed down from my mother, in which images emerging from raw materials serve as portals to understanding the past, present, and future.

My work amplifies the ways in which the human hand alters, abstracts, and reshapes the land, while also engaging with the uncanny and self-generative aspects of the earth itself. I consider geological formations as natural image-makers, colorists, storytellers, and archivists—preserving both the fossilized past and the evolving present. Through this lens, the landscape is not merely a backdrop but an active agent within human histories and mythologies, continuously reshaped by and responding to the forces acting upon it.