BIO Eileen Mantel is a lens-based Artist who utilises video, self-portraiture, and on-camera performance in the exploration of issues within identity, both personal and social. Using herself as a prop, her work involves observing, mimicking, and recreating behaviours in an attempt to bring to focus their unusual origins and significances. She has spent five months embedded in the Mercer’s Institute for Successful Ageing with the goal of developing Patient-Centred artwork. This has granted her the opportunity to base her work on encounters with complex and unique individuals and to nurture the approach of considering person before patient. She has, therefore, developed a sense for feeding her work by drawing from personal connection and the subtlety of human expression through conversation.
She is a member of the LUCIDA Art Collective (2020), a network of lens-based artists who emerged during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic and practice while living in separation throughout Ireland. Lucida Collective is a network of lens-based new media artists which emerged from the Clancy-Quay Professional Development Programme during the early Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020. Connecting across the island of Ireland, they meet through weekly Zoom conversations, crits and collaborations. All of Lucida’s practical support and creative imaginings begin with discussion, and they let their direction organically grow from there; shared thoughts and ideas developing into tangible collaborative artworks. As a collective they are interested in ideas and unfinished drafts, multiplicity and growth over finitude and finished objects. They ascribe to Peter Osborne’s idea of the artwork as a ‘process’ of ‘infinite becomings’. This concept, balmed in their shared connectivity and care; is their essence.