Thinking through doing, recalling through making; Eleanor Louise Butt’s time-based painting practice traces memories and sensations of moving through landscape. Her new works - aided by the surface of coarse linen and visioned with yellow, black, and white -act as monuments in the midst of motion, in a world that seems to always be moving forwards. Her practice plays into the art histories of minimalism, land art, and abstraction through an eclectic mix of repetition, shape, and profound use of negative space.
Always building upon what has come before, she recalls memories of growing up in a large mysterious Edna Walling garden, filled with secret places and winding pathways. As a child she drew maps and impressions of the garden, their allegorical significance later revealing an internal logic independent of any particular timeline or path she had traveled; unraveling other terrains and areas altogether.
In present time, her paintings shift into being in a similar way as to back then in how she uses her subconscious and memories of place as source material. As images, her works intuitively transcribe a meditative practice of bringing to the surface deeply entrenched recollections of a small number of particular places, and in moments of clarity, filtering them into the domain of the tangible by employing richly woven linen surfaces to paint them on; anchoring them in time, place and space as complete yet variable images.
The works that feature in after-image frequent the use of swirling lines that spiral backwards and forwards. Near-perfect circles are full-stopped smack-bang in the middle of her compositions and point towards an inclusion of a ‘self’ amidst void, while her acute use of negative space depicts the outlines of boulder-like shapes and massive forms; or the shadows of them levitating. Her airily rigid images track and trace her memories of moving through landscapes as well as polarising concurrent impressions of light, the rotation and orbit of the planets, seasons and tides; acknowledging the myriad and unaccountable influences of just being in a place.