A New Magic: Here and Now by Eleanor Alice 2026

A New Magic: Here and Now by Eleanor Alice 2026

A New Magic: Here and Now is the latest solo exhibition by Eleanor Alice, presenting a body of work that moves fluidly between abstraction and lived experience. Working across painting and ceramics, Alice explores the subtle traces of daily life, those fleeting, often ungraspable moments that quietly shape how we understand the world.

Based on Kaurna Country in South Australia, Alice has developed a practice over more than two decades that is both intuitive and deeply reflective. Her works are held in private collections across Australia and Europe, and she has been recognised as a finalist in major prizes including the Heysen Prize for Landscape, Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize and the Tatiara Art Prize.

View the walkthrough video here:

Painting as Process, Presence as Subject

In this exhibition, Alice treats painting as a way of thinking through experience. Her compositions unfold through gesture, layering, and material experimentation, allowing meaning to emerge gradually rather than being predetermined.

Organic forms drift across the surface. Lines loop and meander. Pigment pools, stains, and settles. These visual languages suggest transformation, echoing natural cycles, memory, and movement through time.

Moments of clarity appear within abstraction: a fragment of landscape, a hint of plant life, a recognisable form. These elements anchor the work in specific places and experiences, often drawn from the artist’s immediate surroundings or travels.

A Balance of Energy and Stillness

What defines A New Magic: Here and Now is its careful balance between activity and quiet.

Areas of dense mark-making and rich colour sit alongside open, breathable spaces. These pauses are not empty; they act as places of rest, inviting the viewer to slow down and spend time with the work.

This interplay creates a rhythm across the exhibition:

• Movement and suspension
• Detail and dissolution
• Observation and imagination

The result is a body of work that feels both immersive and meditative.

Artist Statement

Alice describes her practice as a way of engaging with the immediacy of lived experience:

“I paint through the seasons of life. Colour, line, shape and gesture holding clues to the language I am most familiar with – of slippery things; the traces they leave once settled in, among surfaces of canvas and clay.

Open spaces offer resting places; quiet areas to melt into and enjoy the calm. Snippets of realism mark time and place… I am grateful and delighted that the magic I experience while making in the playful manner I do, increasingly echoes that which I am exposed to in my everyday life – here and now.”

This sense of attentiveness, to process, to place, to the present moment, sits at the core of the exhibition.

Material Language and Symbolic Form

Across both painting and ceramics, Alice employs a material-driven approach. Surfaces carry evidence of their making: stains, blooms, edges, and gestures remain visible, reinforcing the idea of time embedded within the work.

Her visual vocabulary often includes:

• Looping, thread-like lines suggesting connection or continuity
• Cellular or organic shapes that feel both microscopic and expansive
• Earthy, mineral tones offset by unexpected colour
• Textural contrasts between control and chance

These elements function less as fixed symbols and more as open metaphors, allowing each viewer to form their own associations.

Experiencing “A New Magic”

Rather than directing interpretation, A New Magic: Here and Now offers space—for reflection, for noticing, for being present.

The exhibition encourages a slower way of looking:
to follow a line,
to sit with a colour,
to recognise a form,
and then let it dissolve again.

In doing so, Alice reveals something quietly profound, that the “magic” she speaks of is not distant or extraordinary, but embedded in the textures of everyday life.

View artworks by Eleanor Alice >>>

Exhibition Details

Artist: Eleanor Alice
Exhibition: A New Magic: Here and Now
Dates: 24 April – 24 May 2026