Eileen Quinlan : Doll Parts - Viewing Room

Quinlan’s recent landscapes try to witness cyclical fluctuations and invisible forces that we experience, often unwittingly, every day. The wind’s path, the variations of sea levels and surface temperatures or the gravitational pull are forces that are hugely impactful and strongly felt, but largely invisible to the eye. Affecting objects and humans without touching them, the moon transforms the way things look to the human eye, shifting our spectral sensitivity.

Quinlan’s series of moons and suns rising and falling are first photographed off the moving images of a screen. It is a means to document what is right before the eye but also to grasp a world of fantasy that can carry us away from a troubling reality. The images seek to communicate the passage of time, disrupted by the uncertainty and detachment from the physical world of the pandemic years.

The moon is also connected with female energy. Quinlan’s nudes, a project she has undertaken since 2014, were born of an insurgent desire to continue making art under the time-constrained, inspired circumstances of new motherhood. As her world shrank, her bathroom became a studio where identity, sexuality, mortality, and the domination of women’s bodies could be confronted. The glass shower wall, acts as both a limit and an imaging surface where Quinlan’s compressed, abstracted body is rendered. The nudes of “Doll Parts”, mostly of bare, “mooning” asses, suggest the unattainability of the object exposed. The body can only be depicted as an incomplete figure, as its loss and abstraction.

Fragmented parts of mannequins also convey the idea of a deformed, amputated body that can never be fully legible. The series originated in 2019, when Quinlan was invited by
fashion label Atelier EB, created by Beca Lipscombe and Lucy McKenzie, to participate in the exhibition « Passerby », a historical research into the figure of the mannequin. Quinlan photographed the installation process of the exhibition over the course of two nights. The artist was invited to inhabit Wols role and his documentation of the Pavillion of Elegance at the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris, a late-night alcohol-fueled reverie of the staging of this site that was both a job for hire and his own artistic exploration of these forms and how they could be lit and rendered through the queer eye of the camera.

Mirrors have formed part of Quinlan’s practice since her seminal “Smoke and Mirrors” series, in which they were used to restage display materials used in commercial photography, evoking their illusional effect. In “Doll Parts”, mirrors become the material support of the images, creating a confusion between what is printed, reflected and projected, as the viewer appears fleetingly on the surface.