As art writer, Tai Mitsuji, reflects, “Eleanor Millard’s landscape’s are personal – they represent places the artist has been and paths that she has walked – yet their power resides in the fact that they hold a universal resonance”. This new body of work evolves from the artist’s unyielding love of the quiet seaside community of Port Fairy, Victoria. Seaside cottages and historic structures, set against shifting skies and moody seas, gently drift into frame.

Although drawn from a physical place, her work delves deeper, into a wider realm of emotion and feeling, via a sensitive visual vocabulary informed by the subconscious. Millard’s “brushstrokes pull into existence scenes that tug at our memory”, Mitsuji continues. “They remind us of places that we’ve never seen, yet somehow know”. This subtle tension and paradox – between conscious and subconscious, physical and ethereal, and external and inner-world experience – underlies the artist’s exquisite new solo exhibition, Watching The Tide.

Eleanor Millard has exhibited in major awards, such as the Wynne Prize (Art Gallery of NSW), Salon des Refusés (S.H. Ervin Gallery) and the King’s School Art Prize. Her work is represented in the Kedumba Drawing Collection and has featured recently in Australian House and Garden and Artist Profile. Her work is regularly exhibited in Sydney and Perth and is held in numerous collections in Australia and overseas. Millard was represented by Wagner Contemporary at Sydney Contemporary art fair, 2022.