PHOTOGRAPHS RENDERED IN PLAY-DOH - ELEANOR MACNAIR
Festival Exhibition
Location: TBC
Open: 1st October - 31st October 2025.
Original photograph: New Brighton. From 'The Last Resort', 1983-85 by Martin Parr rendered in Play-Doh by Eleanor Macnair.
Eleanor Macnair began her Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh project on an experimental whim in 2013, and has since amassed both a large audience and an archive of nearly 400 recreated images.
Created in Macnair’s spare time, often late at night, using off-the-shelf Play-Doh, an empty wine bottle as rolling pin, a knife and a chopping board. The only colours she mixes are the flesh tones which she keeps in an old Tupperware container. Each model is then photographed in natural light in her bin yard, with many adjustments to get the angle and lighting just right. Finally, each model is destroyed and the Play-Doh returned to its respective pot ready for the next model.
Macnair's photographic renderings in Play-Doh offer a playful and accessible platform into a greater history of photography, its masters and iconic imagery that define the medium, alongside lesser-known works with the aim of bringing them to them to the fore.
Original photograph: Untitled film still #21, 1978 by Cindy Sherman rendered in Play-Doh by Eleanor Macnair.
On the surface, photographs can condense complex ideas and present them in a straightforward visual language. However, by distilling these seemingly familiar compositions down to basic forms, Macnair hopes to encourage viewers to slow down, to take time when looking and to re-engage with familiar works as well as discover the unfamiliar ones.
We live in an age where we view hundreds of images a day on phones, computers, on billboards and in newspapers but never really look. We scan the information in the image, take what we need and move on. Macnair's reinterpretations present the familiar in a new and extraordinary way, encouraging the viewer to look slowly and rediscover our own child-like wonder at seeing something new for the very first time…something well-needed in our fast-moving modern-age defined by a mass influx of imagery and information.
Original photograph: Trolley, New Orleans, 1955 by Robert Frank rendered in Play-Doh by Eleanor Macnair.
‘I am interested in how we judge art. Who is to say what is good or bad? Who can make it and how? Can we hold it in esteem if it’s not cloaked in art speak, the production costs are minimal and the artist didn’t attend art school? Does this make it less valid? Or more so? Is it even art?’
Original photograph: Boy with June Bug, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1963 by Gordon Parks rendered in Play-Doh by Eleanor Macnair.
Eleanor Macnair (born Nottingham, UK) began ‘Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh’ in August 2013 inspired by a pub quiz by artists MacDonaldStrand. Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh was first published in book form in 2014 and soon after exhibited at Atlas Gallery, London; Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs, Wiesbaden and Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles. In 2017 Macnair created a series of portraits from the National Portrait Gallery collections for a display in their bookshop gallery, London, and an exhibition Surrealists Rendered in Play-Doh was exhibited at Elephant West, London in 2018.
Further exhibitions at Kleinschmidt Fine Photographs followed—Sofas, Birds and Knees, Eyes Wide Shut andSigns.In 2024 her work was included in the exhibition Home Sweet Home at Kunstforum Ingelheim and her second monograph Whilst the World Sleeps was published by RRB Photobooks.
The project has been published in the Observer Magazine, Telegraph Review, The Independent Magazine, Elephant Magazine, T magazine of the New York Times, BBC News, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Vogue Italia, Hyperallergic, IMA and AnOthermag.com amongst others.
Macnair is represented by Black Box Projects, London and a solo exhibition of her work opens at Mai Mano House in Budapest in April 2025.
All festival exhibitions are FREE to visit.