Eleanor Purseglove was born in Birmingham, United Kingdom, and lives and works in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins, London, and worked extensively as a facilitating artist before returning to her painting practice in a significant way in recent years. She has exhibited in the UK and Australia and was the winner of the Brunswick Street Gallery prize in the Fifty Squared Art Prize in 2022. She is a finalist in the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize.

Eleanor’s painting process is intuitive and largely unplanned. Images drawn from promotional material, holiday blogs or social media posts typically provide a subject and basic structure. The specifics of those images quickly fall away as the composition opens out into a more dreamlike space, where abstract and representational elements contradict and trip each other up.  Her practice explores the spaces we escape to in search of an idealised leisure experience. As curated or perfected versions of nature, the gardens and swimming pools of her paintings explore the aesthetic delights of these spaces alongside their contradictions, tensions and disappointments.