Eloise Fornieles' live performances probe loss, intimacy and the relationship between beauty and violence. Informed by the legacies of feminism and performance art of the 1970s yet tinged with a very contemporary approach, the work both questions and celebrates the contradictions of life in the twenty-first century. In her tableau vivant, Senescence, she set up an enormous gramophone-type horn next to her ear whilst she slept heavily after a dose of sleeping pills on a four-poster bed. Viewers were free to whisper sweet nothings or obscenities to her as she snoozed. A Grammar of Love and Violence extended Fornieles' preoccupation with human nature and audience interaction. For the entire duration of the show, she sat in a dimly-lit room filled with exaggerated references to the domestic, bordered by walls of lace, carpeted by cut hair and filled with towers made of scaffolding that resemble a family group, topped with kissing-chairs. The audience was again invited to interact with her, each creating their own unique experience of the work. They were free to observe and engage in a strange dialogue, able to talk to Eloise who, remaining mute all the while, replied with written letters. In the gap between what was spoken and what was written, the artist and her audience created a fleeting impression of both the dissonance and possibilities for connection that lie at the heart of all human interaction.
