Ellen Nora Payne

Ellen Nora Payne (7 January 1865 – 31 January 1962) was an Australian woodcarver.

Life
Payne was born in 1865 in a house called "Westfield" in Westbury, Tasmania. Her parents were Elizabeth (born Lindsay) and Thomas William Field. She was the twelfth of their fourteen children and she had at least seven sisters including Ethelwyn Field who was a (less productive) wood carver. Her family called her Nellie. Her father was a farmer and a politician and her grandfather, William Field, had been a convict turned wealthy landowner.

From 1891 Payne was able to take lessons from the Prussian born woodcarver Robert Prenzel in Melbourne where her husband of four years had moved his practise.

In 1899 she and her husband, Dr Charles Alexander Payne, moved to London and there she was able to study wood carving. She enrolled at the University of London's Goldsmiths' College and the South Kensington School of Art where she studied a wide range of craft skills including wood carving until she returned to Tasmania in 1906.

In 1907 she submitted a carved oak china cabinet that won three prizes at the prestigious women's work exhibition in Melbourne. It won a silver medal and five pounds in one category as well as two other class wins. The other wood carving entrants included Sarah Squire Todd and Dora Walch who were also from Tasmania. One of the other entrants was Maude Baillie from Wedge Island in South Australia.

In 1925 one of her sons accidentally drowned and her husband died.

In 1938 she created a chancel screen for the church where she had married, St Andrew's Church, Westbury. The screen was poignantly named "the seven sisters screen" for her seven sisters who had, by then, died.

In the 1950s she assisted in the restoration of London's very old church All Hallows-by-the-Tower which had been damaged during the second world war.

Payne was survived by two of her children when she died in Hobart in 1962. She is believed to be the only one of the Tasmanian woodcarvers to have had a biography written about them. In 2015 there was an exhibition of 70 of her pieces of work in Westbury that had been organised locally.