Randl_Monsson

Practical Sculpture ASMR Stim Sculpture, Fantasy, and the Secret Transformation of Love into Art

In her collaborative show Monsoon, Eleanor Randl presents functional and ornate acrylic nail sets in boxes that are portals of fantasy, adorned in fur, gems, metals, and silks. Beside the nails, Eleanor includes ASMR stim tools that double as figurative and abstract sculpture. Eleanor is an artist, photographer, ASMR creator, and nail artist. Burned by betrayal, Eleanor transforms pain into functional art that also plays on the abstract. “I don’t want to have shame around love,” she says; creating is “talking about being hurt” and connecting with other people is heartbreak medicine. In Monsoon, each of Eleanor’s sculptures explore personal core memories involving romance, referencing very specific names and details about those eras Eleanor had. While these experiences were very real, a huge inspiration for her sculptures in Monsoon was the boundary of fantasy in love, creations from her specific lens to argue the depth of truth in fantasy. “Relationships are unravelling truths,” Eleanor remarks, despite us agreeing that large portions of relationships occur individually, in our own heads. Art can be a process of honoring and accepting pain from love, to access our rebirth.
CLINGY PRINCESS SET, (we kissed in the forest, I caught a bird in my throat), Eleanor's assemblage of fur, twigs, and diamonds, has burrowed in extra thick, extra long blush pink acrylic nails. This set interprets the experience of accidentally revealing yourself to someone in the process of falling in love, how vulnerable it is, and how it brings our insecurities to light. By constructing an identity from her experience of “loving too much,” Eleanor transforms being vulnerable into “armor instead of a wound.” Clingy Princess was conceived as the title for her sculpture, however it has become the name of Eleanor’s online identity encompassing her ASMR and nail art projects. She discovered after completing the show the idea of “clingy princess AI,” an online chat character designed to act needy and sensitive. Eleanor continues to add duality to the idea of Clingy Princess by creating her own fantasy character, someone who is brave and broken, loving and strong.
In Monsoon, Eleanor includes a crafted ASMR stim tool on the same table as CLINGY PRINCESS SET. Looking like a feathered scalpel, the stim tool has sterile and soft qualities. Tools for self-soothing relate to the theme of art as safety in Eleanor’s work. By presenting acrylic nails and stim tools as art, Eleanor “explores the idea of practical sculpture.” Imagination animates the familiar with the fantastical, like playing in a dollhouse covered in fur. In her work, Eleanor intentionally includes familiar objects as access points for viewers unfamiliar with contemporary sculpture. The nails and ASMR tools invite curiosity to an otherwise unfamiliar art object, utilizing their familiarity to prompt storytelling. Sourcing from cultural symbols and personal narrative, Eleanor’s work creates a space that invites healing in softness and vulnerability.
Breaking down her own ideas of love and security is an important part of Eleanor’s mission to heal through her art. Understanding marriage as a false sense of security was the impetus for Eleanor’s wedding nail set, DOMESTIC FANTASY SET, (10,000 weddings walking towards Andreas), YOU MARRIED ME A THOUSAND TIMES (x10) in your head, (lick my scabs until I’m 10 again), 2025. The title alone functions as a poem, intuitive and free-flowing, personal catharsis for Eleanor that charges the sculpture with feminine rage and truth. Twelve olive-green claws rip open a wedding dress, spilling over a table like a collapsed bride. A vibrant red cavity is exposed in the dress’ bodice. At the Monsoon opening, Eleanor remembers viewers being particularly interested in FANTASY SET. She had conversations with other women about forgone relationships and felt seen and soothed by the community. At the core of this sculpture is the history of the featured wedding dress, gifted to Eleanor by a friend. The dress was purchased by a woman who had moved abroad for her controlling fiance. She was betrayed and ended the engagement. The dress, charged with anxiety, lived on with the woman’s friend who couldn’t discard the object because of its palpable emotional history. “This story is essential to the nature of the sculpture,” Eleanor emphasizes. Eleanor loves the secret folklore in the objects she uses for the nail sets. Using found objects makes her artistic process akin to archaeology, a process of revealing more and more meaning through her work.
In Monsoon, Eleanor explores art as a container for the internal storytelling that happens at the beginning, middle, or end of a relationship. Fantasy is woven into the narrative of all the sculptures, and to see them is to be invited into the constructed and evolving story. “The process of making art is driven by hope and fantasy, just like the process of diving into a relationship.” To engage in the process of making Eleanor begins with a fantasy initially, because “any idea begins that way.” Then the process of completing a work is reaching towards the divine, the universal qualities that rise above the piece and into the sensitive ether. “The more successful it is the closer it is [to the divine],” Eleanor strives to make work that is both a mirror of the self and a transfiguration of something larger. Interweaving love and pain into the same work reveals Eleanor’s commitment to the transcendental while honoring the flawed experience of being in love.