COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Australian artist, Eleanor Louise Butt (b.1981) titled Unfolding Fields, on view Friday 15th May - 27th June at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, Sydney, NSW, 2204. This is the artist's first solo presentation with the gallery.
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.
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-voie) 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.
Eleanor’s title provides a glimpse into how she sees her field of densely overpainted-paint. Claire-voie 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-voie) 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 law-lessness that is necessarily unresolved. Otherwise, as with over-tended gardens, they would be paintings without a secret.
Words by Jan Bryant
