Biography

Eleanor Louise Butt is a Melbourne/Naarm-based artist. She has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and the UK, and has been included in group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Denmark, Brisbane, and Geelong. She has an Honours degree from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2013), and is a current Master of Fine Art by Research candidate at Monash University.

In 2019, Eleanor was the recipient of a tenancy at Porthmeor Studios’ Studio 5, St Ives, Cornwall, UK - the first female Australian artist in the studios’ 140+ year history. She was the winner of the Muswellbrook Art Prize for painting in 2024 (acquisitive), the George Hicks Award in 2012, and has been a finalist in numerous prizes including the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Len Fox Painting Award, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, Muswellbrook Art Prize, Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Waverley Art Prize, and the Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize.

Eleanor’s work is currently featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in the exhibition The Intelligence of Painting, curated by Suzanne Cotter and Manya Sellers. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Artbank Australia, Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection, Gippsland Art Gallery, and private collections in Australia and internationally.

From 2012 - 2021, Eleanor was a curatorial committee member at c3 Contemporary Art Space. Her work has been profiled in Thalia Magazine (US), Art Collector Magazine, Artist Profile, Art Almanac, Reflektor Magazine, ABC Radio National, as well as online and print design publications.

Eleanor is represented by COMA Sydney, and Nicholas Thompson Gallery.

Artist Statement

Eleanor Louise Butt is an Australian contemporary artist whose practice is grounded in studio experimentation. Taking painting as her primary medium, she employs colour, texture, line, and form as strategies for charging surfaces with gestural energy. Expanding these techniques into bronze sculpture and drawing, Eleanor’s work adopts the potentialities of paint to create visual dialogues across a range of media, where action, experience, perception, memory, and art historical references are interwoven.

Coarse linen, canvas, hessian, paper, jute, wax, and bronze are used as foundational surfaces, which function neither solely as object nor image. What follows is an intuitive process of applying and removing paint, pouring, rubbing, and layering. Producing multiple works concurrently, a gesture from one painting provides the starting point for the next, allowing abstract forms to oscillate across multiple planes. Within this expanded process of material experimentation, Eleanor’s works emerge as sites for posing questions and seeking answers.

I acknowledge the tradition owners of the lands where I live and work, and I pay my respects to Elders past and present.