Eleanor Cooper
Interview
Portrait of Eleanor Cooper, 2025. Photo: Ophelia Harradine Bayly
To mark the announcement of Eleanor Cooper’s representation by Grace, and the release of Proton Room (2016), gallery director Emil Scheffmann joins the artist in conversation to reflect on the artist’s early years of practice.
ES:
Hello Eleanor, it’s lovely to see you.
EC:
And you, Emil!
ES:
We’re having this conversation amid your latest exhibition Rain Talk. Though this is not the first time rain has appeared in your practice. What is enduring about this natural phenomenon in your thinking?
EC:
It’s funny how some ideas keep popping up. I think I’m drawn to the drama of the big, spectacular workings of the natural world - tides, geological processes, ecosystems, weather. They make you feel tiny, but also expansive and connected and a bit tickled by the mystery of things that go beyond what we can understand. I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to get to the fringes of where people and the wilds meet, whether that be by going tramping, living on remote islands or sailing, but rain is special in the way it comes right into cities and finds us in the middle of our normal lives. I love how it interrupts us during a busy day and reminds us that we’re part of a big fluid world.
ES:
I like that. There’s a little drizzle as we speak.
EC:
The end of a cyclone.
ES:
You’ve often undertaken ways of living that are — to borrow a word from your bio — ‘wild’, and these lived practices are often felt as a backdrop to your art-making. Can you tell me about this impulse?
EC:
I guess I am attracted to living in certain slightly unusual circumstances for the challenge—it shakes things up and tests the way you see the world. You end up learning things about what you need in the most basic sense—as a creature for survival—but also about how natural systems work when people aren’t interfering with them. And I don’t want to sound cheesy, but in my experiences these living situations can bring people a lot of joy.
As context for Rain Talk, a few years ago my partner and I bought a small yacht, and ended up spending a lot of time repairing and improving it so that it would handle better at sea and be a functional, cosy place to live. I was really drawn to some of the age-old boat building methods that are still in use today—for example timber lamination—and since I was using these techniques on the boat it seemed natural to bring them into the studio.
I really do think that places shape the way we think in powerful ways, and so the works in Rain Talk are about the links between the sea, the weather, and our interior spaces—our thoughts, our language, our aspirations and our sense of ourselves.
ES:
I think we’ll come back to Rain Talk, and some of the beautiful ideas that underpin the body of work. For now, I would like to turn to Proton Room, first exhibited in They say this island changes shape at The Physics Room in 2016. The photograph hangs in the Grace office, and to mark the representation announcement, we’ve brought this older work into dialogue with Rain Talk.
Could you tell me about the origins of Proton Room, and perhaps, the intriguing title?
EC:
I’ve always been really fond of this work and am happy it has come out of the shadows! Proton Room was made while I was living on Rangitāhua (Raoul Island) in the Kermadecs, working for DOC. Spending time on the island really affected me. It’s such a special place and gave me a glimpse into what the natural world would have been like in Aotearoa before people arrived, or what it could be like again if we did things differently in the future. The place is just so full of life—the sea and the forest and the sky.
One of our jobs was to release a daily weather balloon for Metservice, to collect atmospheric data used for weather forecasting. So each day someone would go into this special room and fill a giant latex balloon with hydrogen gas, and tie on a sonde—which is a digital monitoring device that would dangle underneath taking readings of atmospheric pressure—then carry the balloon outside and let go and it would vanish up into the sky. The room where the balloons get filled with hydrogen had the pet name ‘proton room’ (hydrogen having just a single proton), so the work takes its name from that.
Proton Room, 2016
ES:
The photograph also contains less official-looking aerial devices, loosely assembled and translucent things that reveal your own hand. What led to the making of these forms?
EC:
Well what you see in the photograph is the interior of the proton room and, as you say, a collection of objects that could function as kites that I’d made out of debris lying around on the island, mostly pieces of plastic wrap and twigs. I guess that making kites was my take on having a personal connection with the atmosphere, in a slightly playful way. A big feature of the island was also just the sheer number of birds there - mostly sea birds, that nest in the cliffs and on the ground - so many that it can be tricky to find a place to stand that is not crushing a nest. The sky is thick with them, and we spent a lot of time lying on our backs just watching. Looking back, I think I was also just wanting to somehow join in on the swirling avian festivities in the sky.
ES:
What happened to these kites?
EC:
Hmmm I can’t even remember! One thing about living in a nature reserve is that you can’t take anything home, not even a twig or a feather, so everything would have stayed on the island.
ES:
I guess that’s reason enough for taking a photograph…
EC:
It was actually a bit of a puzzle for me at the time, figuring out how to make artworks on an island where you couldn’t take any natural materials away! So yes, in the end I settled on making some objects on site and using a photograph to record them.
ES:
In your materially-agile practice, photography does appear as a consistent thread. Why do you keep returning to the medium, and how do you conceptualise the photographic image?
EC:
I feel a bit unqualified to talk about photography! I guess I’m someone who makes objects and sometimes uses photographs to capture them, rather than someone who sets out to take a photograph in the first instance. For example, sometimes there will be an object that is quite fleeting or fragile, and a photograph is one way to record it. Other times it won’t be appropriate to move or take something away from where it is, and a photograph allows you to share it with others while leaving it in place.
Proton Room is a digital photograph, but often I’ve tended to use more rudimentary photographic methods such as cyanotypes and photograms. These methods don’t necessarily involve a camera at all (but are technically photographs because they involve light-sensitive paper or emulsion) and can offer a very direct, physical connection with whatever is being photographed.
ES:
This is something I love about the way you work. Photography, for instance, can feel almost technocratic in its discourse, but you don’t worry about the distinctions between things like ‘analogue and digital’. In other—more sculptural work, too— you’re willing to work with materials that are old and new, found and carefully-crafted, synthetic and natural. The practice feels incredibly expansive in this respect.
EC:
That’s very kind of you to say. Bringing materials and techniques together in unexpected ways makes them come alive for me. And perhaps I’m also reminding myself that we can do things differently to what our habits and conventions prescribe… that the distinctions between things aren’t set in stone. For instance, it can be tricky to say exactly what is a natural material and what’s not, don’t you think? I try to hold them all equally and see what each has to offer.
Similarly, it’s easy to think that the changes we need to make in order to live more harmoniously with the natural world are going to come from new innovations and technology. But there are so many old techniques and ways of using materials that are completely ingenious, and beautiful too.
Eleanor releases a weather balloon on Raoul Island, 2016. Photo: Zane Goodwin
ES:
Reflecting on the 10 years that have passed since Proton Room, how have the ideas contained in that meteorological station continued?
EC:
One thing that has definitely changed is that I used to just see weather events as being these quite magical expressions of the power of the natural world, you know? Almost in a romantic way. That when you experience a storm you’re witnessing something beautiful and timeless.
Now, after the cyclones and damage that have been felt in the past few years, and with more understanding of climate change, weather events feel different. More foreboding, and I think it’s because the weather is no longer something that is out of our hands—we actually play a role in authoring it. So when a storm comes along and is doing terrible damage and endangering people, it has a different feel about it.
ES:
Coming back to Rain Talk, your work does have a complex and reflexive dialogue with artistic traditions of depicting nature, including — in the West — romanticism. Some of the forms are even reminiscent of the sublime. Does this — largely male — artistic lineage weigh in the formation of the work at all?
EC:
My favourite works tend to be ones that hold room for both the big things and the small things at once, and let some of the gritty details of real life slip in. I guess I aim to make work that comes across as well-informed, and conscious of its context in an art-historical sense, but that is first and foremost true to itself and has its own momentum. Does that make sense? Unlike the tradition you’re describing, I do think there’s a kind of pragmaticism that guides my making… there’s something energising about working with your material circumstances, and trying to be resourceful.
One of the artists that I think achieves this best of all is actually the musician Björk—she’s not afraid of the big romantic gestures, like bringing in an entire orchestra for a song about heartbreak or something, but then there’ll be these amazing counterpoints that are super specific and down to earth, like using recordings she’s made of insect sounds. This kind of contrast feels really refreshing.
ES:
I love that album…. the one she made after her separation from Matthew Barney.
EC:
Me too.
Hone House, 2025. 3D-printed resin, shells from Kākā Point. 300 x 160 x 100.
ES:
Two other artists — writers, to be precise — appear in Rain Talk, Hone Tuwhare and Tove Jansson. Do these figures offer us answers as to how an artist might relate to nature?
EC:
Tove Jansson and Hone Tuwhare are both writers (and Tove was a visual artist too) who chose very deliberately to live beside the sea, and whose work really reflected the physical circumstances of their daily lives there. Tove would spend her summers every year living on this tiny island, writing, drawing, chopping firewood and looking out her kitchen window at storms moving across the sea. Her drawings and stories show how observant she was to both the workings of the natural world, and her own inner world.
With Hone too, he moved to the tiny settlement of Kākā Point on the coast south of Ōtepoti towards the end of his life. When you read the poetry he wrote during his time there, every second piece is about the rain and the sea, and he seemed to almost use the weather and the ocean to process and articulate his emotions.
So I’d say that both Tove and Hone show how inviting the natural world into one's life can be so fruitful, and how aspects of nature can almost become like characters—with all the drama and complexity of a good protagonist—that appear again and again in an artist’s output. On a personal level too, both writers seemed to find real comfort in the sea and the sky. They can be great companions.
ES:
There is a beautiful history of artistic response to Hone Tuwhare’s poetry, from Jim Allen’s Tribute to Hone Tuwhare (1969) to Ralph Hotere’s Rain (1979). Why do you think visual artists have continually returned to his work?
EC:
That’s a good question. I recently read Hone Tuwhare’s biography, and it was clear that Hone and Ralph Hotere had a friendship and close connection over many years, and would make work in response to one another. Hone would read poems at Ralph’s exhibitions, and so on. But there’s also something about the poems themselves. They’re so packed with visual imagery, and when it comes to the natural world there’s this really great sensibility, a kind of connection that seems down to earth and not at all purist… actually it’s often mischievous and downright irreverent. So I think perhaps artists have found this appealing.
ES:
Thanks for your time, Eleanor. It’s been great to chat and explore these pātai with you. There’s a lot more we could talk about… I especially wish we had time to discuss the presence of illustrative forms and children’s story-telling in Rain Talk. But I guess we’ll leave something in the tank for next time.
What do you think awaits you after Rain Talk?
EC:
Well speaking of children, I’m currently 39 weeks pregnant, so I do have this sense that my world is about to be flipped upside down! I’m trying to keep an open mind about what life with a baby might look like, but am sure that art and books and walks will still find a place.
Proton Room, 2016 Pigment ink on Ilford Cotton Rag 660 x 500 (aluminium frame with AR70 glass) Edition 2 of 5 + 1 AP
$2500 NZD
Eleanor Cooper is an artist who likes wild places and their stories. Her work explores natural and cultural history, ecology and language. Originally from Tāmaki Makaurau, she lived aboard a small yacht for two years and has recently moved ashore to Porirua to plant a garden.
Cooper’s exhibitions include: A Fire that Blackened the Rocks at Te Atamira (2024), Shipwreck at Paper Anniversary (2023), They covered the house in stories at Te Tuhi (2021), The rustling wind reminds me of life on Earth with Xin Cheng at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū (2021), Greywater at Mokopōpaki (2020), Bouquet at Blue Oyster (2020), They say this island changes shape at The Physics Room (2016) and Herme’s Lack of Words at Artspace Aotearoa (2013, Group Show).
Cooper holds a Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Auckland.