Rebecca Byrne
Rebecca Byrne’s fantastical natural scenes are flooded with colour. The American artist’s paintings, drawings and ceramics are held in a careful balance between abstraction and figuration, observation and the imagination. Her dreamy worlds offer a place of escape and solace for both the viewer and the artist, a space for the mind to wander free from the body.
Byrne’s work is optimistic, exploring the richness of the internal world with the shelter and respite it can provide for those navigating challenges. This is inspired in part by her own experiences, though she imagines a universal rather than strictly personal world.
Working with a mix of oil and acrylic paint, coloured pastels and pencil, she uses expressive, physical marks that mutate until the surface becomes a palimpsest of sorts, connecting with the artist’s interest in plants’ resilience and ability to adapt to their surroundings as she repeats her subject matter. Her otherworldly scenes, loaded with extinct and living vegetation, flowers and trees, celebrate the diversity of form and colour found in the natural world while bridging time to suggest a continuity of existence.