Eloise Stringer

I am a multidisciplinary practitioner and filmmaker. I am originally from the remote Cambridgeshire fenland but moved to London to study my foundation and BA at Central Saint Martins. Thanks to my rural upbringing and being immersed in nature since I was a child as well as participation in local village folk events, I am drawn to documenting traditional, historical and cultural rituals, crafts, practices and ways of life. 

I have a passion for satire, activism and social justice, and work within themes of modernising traditional archives, oral histories and intergenerational knowledge exchange. My practice spotlights cultural and traditional heritages, their legacies and their ever-changing circumstances.

I work with a variety of mediums, typically analogue and digital film, sound design, soundscaping and as well as printmaking, drawing and illustration. 

My work predominantly focuses on untold narratives told through stories of individuals characteristic of their communities as a whole, and through it I seek to raise awareness of broader community issues and wider social troubles.

These include the impact of Covid-19 on longstanding organisations, inequality and wealth distribution throughout the UK, as well as climate issues. More recently, I have focused on documenting market cultures in London’s East End, of which I have been a part for several years.

The methods I employ as a practitioner focus around documenting and observing cultures visually, particularly through film and images, in order to better understand how they work and the challenges and adversities they face. From their experiences, I construct a narrative to tell an otherwise unfamiliar audience of perspectives and ways of life otherwise unseen.

The way I construct my films is very site-focused with almost all archive material and artefacts being made, and research being done, with the help and guidance of local communities through dialogic exchanges and their inherited local knowledge. I seek to immerse myself as much as possible to observe and preserve the moods, characters and zeitgeist of the place successfully in the subsequent works.

These often feature individual voices as storytellers, my own and others, as oral archiving is an incredibly important and traditionally overlooked factor in documenting social histories. This is particularly common in archives where the traditional methodologies in place often overlook certain liminal groups within society, and also the broader lessons their experiences have to tell us about social practice, tradition and latent culture. I seek, through my lens, to overturn traditional paradigms of documentation of marginalised communities often mistrustful of their potentially unjust misrepresentation by outsiders.

My practice has always been inherently participatory; in my films, this means asking communities to guide their representation, through commentaries, narrations and even filming themselves for a first hand perspective in the instance of ‘Brick Lane Kinship & Family’, breaking down the hierarchy of the observer vs observed whilst giving them agency over what they would choose to depict.