Ellen Nora Payne

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

Early life and education Payne was born on 7 January 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. 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. One of the other entrants was Maude Baillie from Wedge Island in South Australia.

In 1925, one of Payne's sons accidentally drowned and her husband died. In 2015, there was an exhibition of 70 of her pieces of work in Westbury that had been organised locally.