Biography

Eleanor Louise Butt has held solo exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and the UK since 2014, and has been included in group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Denmark, and Geelong since 2009. 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.

Eleanor was the 2019 recipient of a tenancy at Porthmeor Studios, 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 the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize (2023), Muswellbrook Art Prize (2023, 2024), Waverley Art Prize (2023), Omnia Art Prize (2023), Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize (2016) and the M Collection Art Award (2016).

Eleanor’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Artbank Australia, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, as well as in 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.

Artist Statement

Eleanor Louise Butt is a Melbourne-based 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of paint to create visual dialogues across a range of media, where action, experience, perception, memory, and art historical references are interwoven.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.