BIO
Eleanor Crook trained in sculpture at Central St Martins and the Royal Academy and makes figures and effigies in wax, carved wood and lifelike media. She has also made a special study of anatomy and has sculpted anatomical and pathological waxworks for the Gordon Museum of Pathology at Guy's Hospital, London's Science Museum, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. She exhibits internationally in both fine art and science museum contexts. She learned the technique of forensic facial reconstruction modelling from Richard Neave and has demonstrated and taught this to artists, forensic anthropology students, law enforcement officers and plastic surgeons as well as incorporating this practice in her own sculpted people. Following a lifelong interest in Northern Renaissance woodcarving, and influenced by the experience of dissecting in order to learn anatomy, she studied limewood carving at the Geisler-Moroder wood carving school in the Austrian Tyrol. In the interest of making figures more lifelike than the living, using a generous grant from the Wellcome Trust she developed the incorporation of electronic animatronics systems into the sculptures so that her moribund and macabre creations now can twitch and mutter. Eleanor is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum of Pathology, a member of the Medical Artists' Association, runs a course in Anatomy drawing at the Royal College of Art and lectures on the M. A. Art & Science course at Central St Martins School of Art in London.