Set just beyond the threshold of her home, Eleanor Louise Butt’s studio is less a workspace than a quiet shift in consciousness. Accessed by a pathway through the garden, entering the studio marks an intentional departure from the everyday. It’s here, in this space of heightened attention, that Eleanor’s paintings emerge: physical, immersive, intuitive, and attuned to the rhythms of perception.
Ahead of her first solo exhibition at COMA 'Unfolding Fields', opening Friday 15 May, the artist speaks to Associate Director Chloe Morrissey about ritual, memory, and the enduring imprint of a childhood garden that continues to shape the way she sees and paints the world.
Chloe Morrissey: What is the first thing you do when you enter your studio?
Eleanor Louise Butt: The transition to being in a studio mindset starts when I step out the front door. Walking down the garden path to the studio, I brush against plants that lean over the pathway, and it feels like I’m journeying from one place to another. Even though the studio is right next to the house, once I’m inside, it feels completely separate, like I’ve stepped into another world. I open the curtains, let the light in, and our dog Mabel, and look at the paintings I’ve been working on while giving her a cuddle. I don’t rush anything. I spend time getting into the zone, by putting on music, and feeling out what might happen that day. It’s about settling into the rhythm of the space.
Do you have any studio rituals?
Nothing that I think of as a ritual, my studio is a place of action where I go to focus, think, make, and follow the work wherever it wants to go. I start by looking for a way into the beating heart of a painting - an ongoing negotiation between myself and the work.
Are there materials or tools that feel especially specific to your practice?
Yes, there are certain brushes and surfaces that are really important to the way I work. I make some of my own brushes too - not from scratch - but recently I have been buying large long-handled brushes from the hardware store and cutting the bristles into the shape I want. I use rags a lot too, for both painting and erasure. In the studio, the tools become extensions of my body - I’ll share a quote I love by the painter Pat Passlof who said that: “the brush is the finger of the brain”, this is how it often feels!
Your paintings often feel as though they're being summoned rather than simply composed. Does that resonate?
Yes, it does. Lately I’ve been thinking less about imposing something onto the surface, and more about pulling the painting out of the space of the canvas, and discovering it through the act of making. It feels like I’ve got to summon the painting out of somewhere, allowing it to appear. I’m not coming at them with a pre-conceived sketch or a fixed plan, so in the studio I’m scratching around, prowling, allowing space for whatever needs to happen in the painting to unfold. Through this process, I work to reveal some of the secrets that the painting might hold - an unearthing that is limitless and generative.
Theres a strong sense in your work of being inside the painting while also seeing it from a distance. Is that something you think about consciously?
I do think about depth and perception, but a lot of this happens intuitively through the process itself. The painting reveals itself over time. I might begin with a nebulous feeling, but it’s through working that the painting becomes what it is. That feels similar to my experience of my childhood garden, which I often use an experiential parallel of the embodied experience of a painting.
Your childhood garden feels central to your work. Can you tell me more about it?
It was an incredible garden known as Delara, designed by Edna Walling sometime around 1930s. This multi-layered, expansive space was filled with winding paths, bright green moss, a creek, stone steps, stone walls, and garden rooms that opened unexpectedly as you turned a corner. As a child I was completely absorbed within this deep and beautiful secret world, it felt like I was living inside a painting. My experience of being physically immersed within this space continues to contribute to the internal logic of my paintings as they unfold in the studio.
How has that memory entered your painting practice?
This new body of works evokes a sensation of being bodily surrounded by light and shade, by a density of colours and forms. By unearthing the analogy of the garden, I have come to experience the paintings themselves as sites of physical immersion and embodied encounter. I learned many lessons from living within Delara’s garden that continue to be deeply influential to my painting practice today, a key lesson stemming from the dedicated weeding and digging that revealed elements of the garden that were hidden below layers of soil and overgrowth. This shows up in the way I approach a canvas as a site of revelation and discovery, often beginning a painting by working in loose brushstrokes that rake across the surface until I detect a germinating seed from which the painting will grow, or through the sense that there is something just out of sight behind an area of paint, waiting to be discovered.
Is there a book or text that has stayed with you?
Patrick White’s The Vivisector was formative for me. I read it several times as a teenager, and what struck me most was the absolute dedication of the artist at its centre. I was drawn to the intensity of that life, not every aspect of the character Hurtle Duffield’s, of course, but to the book’s depiction of painterly obsession, the commitment, the sense of painting as a total way of being.
What do you hope the viewers feel when they encounter the new work?
It is a slippery challenge to write about a painting practice that operates as a distinct language outside of the verbal. I can’t control what a viewer feels - and I wouldn’t want to - but what they might perceive in the works is a sense of energy and ambiguity, built up through layers of looking, painting, and uncovering - a process that imbues the paintings with a kind of living quality. To me they feel like worlds that can be stepped into - spaces that are not statically fixed, but active.
Eleanor Louise Butt's solo exhibition 'Unfolding Fields', opens Friday 15 May, 2026 at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, 2204. On view through 27 June, 2026.
