In Rain Talk, Eleanor Cooper considers the literary habitations of Tove Jansson and Hone Tuwhare through a poetic language shaped by the sea. Drawing on boat building techniques, Cooper creates forms that drift between droplets and punctuation, together comprising a kind of 'weather' within which the coastal dwellings of Jansson and Tuwhare are located. Through Rain Talk, imagination unfolds from the promise of words, as Cooper attests to the places a writer might reside.

In Hone House and Tove House, two writers from distant seas—Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa and the Baltic, respectively—are imagined alongside one another. Writing across similar periods of the twentieth century, Jansson and Tuwhare chose to live in simple dwellings that offered minimal separation from the elements. Drawing on the influence of these writers, Cooper—who herself has recently ‘returned to land’—imagines a far-flung and interior journey. The artist’s home is envisioned as a porous body, immersed in the natural world and imbued with creative spirit.

Throughout Rain Talk, the artist engages a minimal illustrative language, echoing Jansson’s depictions of stormy skies and Tuwhare’s attentiveness to the natural world near his writer’s crib. In Hone House, shells gathered at Kākā Point fill the semi-opaque walls of the home—small mementoes that speak to memory and place. Reflecting on this transparency, Cooper describes the homes as ‘lenses’ through which the inhabitant might see. 

The plinths, too, carry their own narrative, informed by Jansson's The Iceberg (1968). The story follows a girl who marvels at an iceberg drifting into her bay and, in a gentle conclusion, places her torch on the ice before sending it back to sea. In sculpting these plinths, Cooper echoes the waveforms of Jansson’s own hand, and attending to the story’s quiet finale, illuminates the sea-shapes with torchlight.

Surrounding the structures is the ‘weather’ that clings to the seaside, curvilinear forms suspended between language and water. Developed from Cooper’s earlier Shipwreck (2023) series, the artist creates apostrophes and commas that appear as droplets—syntax rendered through the expansiveness of water. The laminated wood surfaces are treated with sands of black iron and white quartz, the patterns at times evoking falling rain across shifting skies of light and dark. In dialogue with Tuwhare’s Rain-Talk and Fever (1977), Cooper’s rain glistens with movement and assumes an ethereal presence, dovetailing with Ralph Hotere’s triptych ode to the poet, Rain (1979).

Through the liquid punctuation of Rain Talk, Cooper invokes a sublime where monochromatic gradients dissolve into orbital horizon lines. While drawing upon this Western art tradition, she simultaneously deconstructs its romanticised notions of the artist. Her practice is grounded in pragmatism, shaped by lived experience—whether through employment (as a worker for Heritage New Zealand) or necessity (as a former seafarer). Rather than imposing narrative, Cooper’s storytelling emerges with quiet sensitivity; the stories of people and place are held with care, allowed to surface in their own time, in their own language.

- Emil Scheffmann