Imaging the Fixed and Fluid Body: The Work of Eleanor Kipping

The image glitches, freezes, and blurs, comes back into focus. Eleanor Kipping lifts to her computer camera a beautifully unexpected, almost-arcane object: a well-preserved, coiled horn from a goat, a souvenir from a recent trip to Maine. 

It’s early in our Zoom call. As Kipping and I discuss our fondness for these playful, intelligent animals, we are trying—in tracing our curiosities and interests—to understand each other’s histories, how they lead to our respective practices. Between New York and New Delhi, the sometimes-dissolving, thankfully-reassembling laptop image translates and mediates between our physical worlds—apt for a first meeting with Kipping, who works with the material and ephemeral, between fixedness and fluidity.

Artist and educator Eleanor Kipping (born in 1989) often draws on her upbringing in the predominantly white environs of rural Maine, where she grew up as a mixed-race, Black queer woman. Across mediums including performance, video, photography, and installation, Kipping has developed a body of work that often returns to questions of visibility, othering, and belonging, wherein the body is, both, site and method of inquiry.

Dreaming of Malaga: Silk Print Collages
Image courtesy of the artist

When we speak in February 2026, Kipping tells me her body is in a transitional moment: healing from spinal surgery and traveling often between Maine and New York. Kipping was an artist in residence at Indigo Arts Alliance in May 2025 and, from her Brooklyn studio, she sees that period as one of healing: “It was my first time returning to Maine after a long while, and the sense of community centered in Blackness at Indigo was deeply meaningful.” 

Kipping conceived her recent work in progress Dreaming of Malaga at Indigo, turning towards the fractured history of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, where a Black and mixed-race community was forcibly removed by the state in 1912. Through Indigo, Kipping connected with descendants of those evicted from Malaga—a community in the process of reforging a shared identity after decades of dispersal, pushing for recognition. Within this collective remembrance, Kipping dreams of Malaga obliquely: through fragments that remain of that forced scattering, images and material traces, with scanographs, silk and fiber, with technologies probing how language and representation shape what is remembered, misremembered, or deliberately obscured.

One pillar of Kipping’s practice is the archival image and how it both shapes and is shaped by history; another is the viral image and how it is transmitted, its connection with disease and propaganda, of the virus as ‘other.’ Working through her father’s passing due to HIV-related complications, Kipping braids together the otherings imposed on racialized and queer bodies within dominant society in her performance Daddy Issues. Layering her live body over family and archival footage, which she discusses in a conversation with the artist Justin Hicks, Kipping’s monologue brings together scientific discourse and personal memory. Body and image layer in transmission as well, where Kipping examines how public health rhetoric mobilizes language of contagion, making the figure of ‘the infected’ a bodily site of projection for broader social anxieties—as well as how communication technologies enable the spread of this language, via, in Kipping’s superimpositions, the example of viral images of the first moon landing.

Image is the medium—layered, mediated—at the heart of Kipping’s practice, what she returns to. How an image is ‘made,’ what power it has, how it alters perception or is altered itself, how fragile or fleeting or viral it can be: into these urgencies, Kipping channels histories public and private. In her installations as in her performances, the image becomes less an unchangeable, flattened record than something embodied and porous, continually remade by encounters with the body of the artist and those of the audience/viewers.

This attention to what the body carries extends into gatherings that Kipping facilitates as an educator and at Camp El, the artist retreat she co-founded in Alton, Maine. These spaces are less parallel tracks than natural offshoots of the core values shaping Kipping’s work. Kipping approaches her classrooms at Pratt or Parsons as spaces to be shaped collectively—with care towards her students and the different cross-generational histories and vulnerabilities that they bring. Camp El, in Kipping’s geography of origin, is a similar site of encounter between bodies and histories. Creating space especially for BIPOC, queer and women artists, the retreat deliberately disrupts the rural Maine landscape by challenging who has the right to inhabit and create work here. 

Recounting the moment she signed for Camp El’s land trust in 2025, Kipping laughs at how this personal monumental history was made in the prosaic setting of a UPS store, a nonetheless fitting site for circulating histories. While the image, in her work, is perpetually shifting or mediated, Camp El is a material, rooted counterpart: a determined place for bodies to gather, a space to land for those in motion. It is in this constant negotiation of fixity and flux that Eleanor Kipping creates coherence, shifts and rests, gathers momentum.