Eleanor Macnair: “Carving Contemporary Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh”

Eleanor Macnair's approach to her photographic process is playful and inquisitive. Taking both iconic and lesser-known photographs and reconstructing them out of Play-Doh, she pares the original images down to their most simple forms and colours. The act of studying and recreating these two-dimensional images into a colourful sculpture form out of Play-Doh allows the artist the opportunity to slow down the act of viewing and to really examine the image, a challenge she also sets for those viewers who encounter her work.

United Kingdom – 

This new publication, Photographs Rendered in Play-Doh, reproduces for the first time, Eleanor Macnair’s Play-Doh reproductions of photographs from the blog photographsrenderedinplaydoh. The photographs in the publication range from the well known and iconic, to lesser-known images by contemporary photographers. The project started on a whim following a photo pub quiz run by MacDonaldStrand, in Brighton, August 2013. One of the rounds was to make a reproduction of a famous photograph using Play-Doh. One year later and Macnair’s blog has been viewed by thousands of people across the world and has a following amongst professional photographers and curators.


Photographs rendered in Play-Doh, books                                                               Photography by Jana Romanov


The project has cost forty pounds to produce, including Play-Doh, chopping boards and a highball glass to use as a rolling pin. Each photograph took about an hour to create, shoot and then disassemble back into the Play-Doh pots. The works no longer exist and the green blanket from the Cartier-Bresson later became a snake in the Madame Yevonde, the bushes in the Becher, the hood in the Judy Joy Ross and the hosepipe in the Stephen Shore. ‘I have a simple, naïve love of photography and I hope this is reflected in this series. It’s my strange tribute to photography.’ The book is published as a collaboration between MacDonaldStrand and Photomonitor, and designed by The Entente. Five different ‘Play-Doh’ coloured covers are available.

Art & Culture

Related Posts

Goldilocks’ Love Child – Teddy Boy Kill

India – The heap of genres, the noise that needed to be edgy, distinct and solid in true terms of ...

Curiously Capturing the World – Mike Corey

Canada – Mike Corey’s “Kick the Grind TV”, could be called an amalgamation of his degree in biology, his love ...

Zhang Huan: The Man with Three Legs

China- Currently based in Shanghai after working out of New York for eight years, Chinese artist Zhang Huan creates art which is both ...

Madboy/Mink: ‘I-Mad’ and the Squirrel

India – Madboy/Mink, a duo with Imaad Shah and Saba Azad makes electronic music mashing up old school Funk and ...

Wafaa Bilal : Translating the Body

U.S.A. –  Wafaa Bilal is no traditional artist.  This Iraqi-born American artist draws from his personal life and identity to ...

Breakfast Cereal as Pop Culture Object – Ernie Button

U.S.A. –  American artist Ernie Button finds the human element in deserted places.  His photographs capture a sense of nostalgia ...

Amber Nolan : Airplane Hitchhiker

U.S.A. – Amber Nolan has taken the well-known form of wandering, hitchhiking, to a whole new environment: the air. By ...

Darren Ornitz : Rebel With a Cause

U.S.A. –  With a vision of bridging cultural barriers and connecting to the people, Darren Ornitz set out to explore the lands ...

Kashmiri Kaleidoscope

India – Having seen the Himalayas from Ladakh to Sikkim I thought I was prepared for what Kashmir had to ...