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Eleanor Yap
"Planet Earth"
June 22 - July 20 2007
Opening Friday June 22 6-9pm

Eleanor Yap, like many others, is fascinated, even obsessed by the idea of planet earth no longer being inhabited by the Human Race. We, the highest evolved creatures in this world are constantly concerned with our own future, and fearful of an apocalypse that may or may not be induced by ourselves. This has been an endlessly persistent subject of our thoughts since religion instilled this fear in our cultural psyche thousands of years ago. Yap’s works are images that toy with this human obsession in a post-apocalyptic world. Alternatively they are not mere images of the post nuclear depictions of derelict desserts or even scenes of revelation of Religious eschatology, on the contrary Yap depicts a beautiful, lush, thriving world, free from human concern. Her images of plants and animals rule the landscape and overwhelmingly take over the plane of her canvases, to celebrate the possibilities of life on this planet after possible human extinction.

Yap creates her work by first drawing small scientific like images with mixed media, carefully cutting each out and then emphatically collecting, storing, documenting and investing much obsessive detail into each collage-like image. Yap then painstaking scans every illustration, and then neurotically dedicates time to piecing her fantasy realms together. This process situates Yap as the architect of a new world or a mad scientist fixated with her own creations and obsessed with controlling her landscapes, in which the ocean swallows up the land and under water plants, sea animals and microscopic invertebrates seize control. The animal and plant life in these new environments mutate and join forces becoming a new kind of living force, adapting to an ecosystem humans could not.

Inspired by her mothers incessant collecting and hoarding of paintings and porcelain bric-a-brac; Combined with memories of child hood journeys to her family’s native Philippines, Yap releases her subconscious, in order to create an extremely organised rhythm through interesting and somewhat intense and crowded compositions, filled with the rich colours and sensations of fruit, vegetables, animals and the natural environment, creating order in a chaotic world.






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