Unfolding Fields (2026)
‘Behind our house there is an old, neglected garden. When I see it in the early morning from the office window … I am sorry for it, lying there untended, and each time I want to go down and look after it. But those are sentimental ideas. The devil take such misleading dreamy softness.’
Robert Walser, Jakob Von Gunten [1909]
(trans.) Christopher Middleton
(New York: New York Review of Books, 1969) p.86.
You are living in a painting from Unfolding fields by Eleanor Louise Butt, subtitled (claire-voie).[1] At the centre of the painting is a space of dark brownish paint, forming a vertiginous chasm. This abyss-like form is surrounded by a field of gold (with specks of dark green). Some of the original ground is still peeping through the heavily painted, golden surface, as though Eleanor is handing us a perspectival folly. Acting as a framing device, the gold paint is licking over the edges of what Eleanor has described as an ‘opening’ and an ‘invitation’. The framing of this ‘opening’ by the outer field in (claire-voir) flips the idea that a frame enhances or complements an enclosed image. The chasm is acting more like an anti-image, or a secret origin, even a vertiginous tripping hazard as one is pulled into the abyss. It means the ‘invitation’ anticipates both tantalising and menacing possibilities.
And yet, It would be foolhardy to think that this is a preordained design by Eleanor. Her way of painting is to lose her mind somewhere between the bare, white cotton supports and the paintings’ provisional closures.[2] Calling Eleanor’s method a ‘loss of mind’ is to ascribe not madness but rather mindlessness, a method by which the intellect subsides as an intuitive, embodied submersion of painter to painting takes over. It means that it is only after the painting process that self-reflective interpretation elicits potential meanings.
Eleanor’s title provides a glimpse into how she sees her field of densely overpainted-paint. Claire-voir is a term borrowed from French Baroque garden design; an era driven by the kingly power to shape nature as a divine right. It describes the way unexpected views are built into the design, such as hidden garden rooms revealed through ‘windows’ in hedges. Surprises popping out of ordered sightlines is a theatrical effect: but as with the repudiation by Robert Walser above, tending unruly gardens can lead to sentimentality: “The devil take such misleading dreamy softness.” I read this to mean that the desire to tame and control nature (or painting) through uniformity and orderliness is also a destructive desire. It removes spaces for viewers’ imaginations to flourish,[3] as well as the playfulness of the painter who is seeking the unexpected around each brush stroke. Paintings for Eleanor, like gardens for Jacob Von Gunten, Walser’s character, oscillate between desire and imagination, rules and unruliness. “There are quite other gardens with us”, Jacob declares, “To go into the real garden is forbidden. No pupils are allowed in there. I don’t really know why. But, as I said, we have another garden, perhaps more beautiful than the actual one.” (p. 87)
‘Just as in the garden (especially my childhood Walling garden, Delara), when a view is obscured by, for example, a tree or shrub (which can be thought of as a form made of colour and movement), I sense that were I to move beyond them, another site of experience would be revealed. This is one of the reasons why when layers of paint hide elements of a work, I still have a sense that something I want to experience is sitting just out of reach.’
Eleanor Louise Butt exchange, April 23, 2026
(claire-voir) is only one example from Unfolding Fields that allows for a deeper dive into Eleanor’s method. Her way of opening mysterious pathways, untamed surfaces and depths means that her paintings retain a tension between restraint and lawlessness that is necessarily unresolved. Otherwise, as with over-tended gardens, they would be paintings without a secret.
Jan Bryant
Art Programme
artprogramme.org
[1] Unfolding fields (claire-voie), 2026. Oil on cotton, 167.5 x 198 cm
[2] Eleanor sees her paintings as continuous events, without closure. Also, while some paintings are not touched again, others become starting points for new ones.
[3] It is probably far removed from Eleanor’s intentions, but once Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) [oil on canvas, 46cm × 55cm, Musée d’Orsay] entered my mind, it wouldn’t leave. It stuck to my thoughts like flies to old flypaper. Might Unfolding (claire-voie) be an abstract version of Courbet’s vulvic nude (controversial and often censored) a work that has inspired numerous films and artworks? Could it be slotted into a line of modern art history that includes Marcel Duchamp’s assemblage, Étant donnés (1946–1966) [Philadelphia Museum of Art]? The tableau of a Courbet-inspired body is witnessed through peep holes in an old door? Or Katherine Breillat’s film, Anatomie de l’enfer (2004) that used the same pose for her sex scene?