Equal parts raw intuition and tactile immersion, Eleanor Louise Butt’s painting practice transforms landscape, memory, and materiality into dynamic visual events. Ahead of Sydney Contemporary, she unpacks her presentation with COMA, and why literal representation takes a backseat to wordless, sensory-charged art-making.
Gesture, texture and movement play a strong role in your work. How do you know when a painting has reached resolution?
When I am painting, I am in a deeply intuitive space of action and reaction. Reaching the point of resolution usually takes me by surprise, when it happens and I experience a jolt of recognition and it is in this moment that the painting becomes a world in itself.
Colour feels central to the atmosphere of your paintings, particularly your use of warm yellows and earthy tones. How does colour shape the emotional register of a work?
I am sensitive to the way that colours make me feel awash with, for example, sensation or memory, and this leads many of my choices in the studio. It is hard to verbally describe the way these colours make me feel, because it is such a sensory experience. Colour can draw you into a painting, it can surround and embrace you, and in this moment of engagement, it is just you and the painting, existing in relation to each other.
Photo: Eleanor Louise Butt, Eleanor Louise Butt, Untitled, 2026. Courtesy the artist and COMA
You often work across multiple paintings at once. How do those works begin to “speak” to one another in the studio?
Oil painting is a slow process, whereby each layer needs time to dry before the next can be added, so I paint multiple works concurrently both out of necessity and because I work so energetically. Throughout this process, gestures and colours recur across the surfaces as, for example, where a series of marks in one painting informs the resolution of the next painting. Not only do forms, colours and marks oscillate across the paintings, but the works become an ongoing event in which no mark is final. Upon completion, a painting does not become an artefact of an event, but rather a charged space for the continuation of the event.
Eleanor Louise Butt Studio, Courtesy the artist and COMA
Eleanor Louise Butt Studio, Courtesy the artist and COMAMateriality seems integral to your practice; from coarse linen and hessian to bronze and paper. What do different surfaces allow you to explore?
I am interested in having a direct and immediate experience with a painting, and my physical connection to materials when coaxing a work into existence is a vital part of this process. Different surfaces allow me to explore the interplay between paint and surface, and what these relationships can evoke. Primed cotton presents a smooth and slippery surface, leading to a painting that appears to be sliding around and barely fixed, whereas a coarse linen or hessian grips the paint in an entirely different way, allowing the painting to feel more like a cultural object.
Eleanor Louise Butt, Studio, Courtesy the artist and COMA
Eleanor Louise Butt, Studio, Courtesy the artist and COMALandscape appears in your work less as direct representation and more as sensation or memory. How do place and environment influence your practice?
While undertaking the Porthmeor Studios artist residency in the UK, my experience of the extreme forces of nature there – the thrashing ocean swells colliding with granite cliffs below windswept bracken-covered moors – compelled me to make works that were ambitious and gestural in a way that resonated with my own embodied experience of that landscape, rather than depicting it. This continued when I came home to my studio in a forest on the outskirts of Melbourne/Naarm. My painting practice also carries undercurrents of the Edna Walling designed garden in which I lived in during my childhood, a space I now consider as a ‘living painting’. This garden constantly revealed and concealed elements and details as I moved through it, and my experience of being physically immersed within this environment continues to contribute to the internal logic of my paintings as they unfold in the studio.
What can audiences look forward to encountering in your presentation with COMA this year, and how does it reflect where your practice is currently sitting?
I am presenting two new paintings with COMA this year. I have been thinking of these works as ‘thickets’. These paintings are spaces I have become entangled within and feel I can escape to. They are loose and immediate, filled with cascading forms and colours poised in a dynamic state of potentiality where no single work is neatly resolved. This fluidity reflects my own experience of the world, in which experience passes beyond the confines of language. The potential for wordless experience and mystery, both for myself and the viewer, continues to be a key theme of my studio practice.
Eleanor Louise Butt, Courtesy the artist and COMA
Eleanor Louise Butt, Courtesy the artist and COMAEleanor Louise Butt will be presenting with COMA, booth
Sydney Contemporary returns to Carriageworks from 3 – 6 September. Tickets are on sale now.
