Eleanor Louise Butt

Surge (cascading yellow abstraction) 2024
oil on cotton
Courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne

Artist statement:

Within my painting and sculptural practice, action, sensation, perception, memory, materiality, and art history, are interwoven. In the studio I employ an intuitive process of applying and removing paint by brushing, pouring, rubbing, and layering it onto coarse linen, canvas, hessian, or paper. Works are improvised in the moment, with room for ambiguity, accidents, failure, and chance, to play a part in an embodied process of creation and excavation.

I painted this work as the sunlight glowed through the leaves outside my studio, and I strove to expand this atmosphere into the painting. The yellow radiates and envelops the viewer, while the qualities of varying hues shift and float on the surface and a surge of sensation emerges, depicting a phenomenological relationship with the world.