Pacific Breeze II

Rebecca Byrne is an American painter living and working in London; she works on canvas and aluminum, as well as 9m long paper which she uses to create immersive site-responsive installations that can be rolled up and reinterpreted in another location.  Her interest is in the psychological impact of spaces, both man-made and natural, and she presents strange landscapes that reflect an interior world.

Byrne’s uncanny and fantastical landscapes are rooted in fragments of memory, reality and fantasy, they explore our relationship to the environment by referencing images of extinct and existing plant life that never actually co-existed, creating pictures of nature in flux.  Throughout her practice there is an obscured personal narrative; Byrne’s recent work draws from her background growing up in urban Chicago and spending weekends with her parents as they attempted to establish a small organic farm well before most people were considering our relationship to the land.  Researching the systems and structures of plants, she uses real and imagined subject matter to propose an alternate natural world.

Beginning with intuitive gestural marks that cover the surface and become seeds for the painting that follows, Byrne reacts to these early marks by drawing, scratching into and layering up to an image until the surface becomes a palimpsest of painting.  She repeats her subject matter, mining the constant state of change in the natural world to explore the parallels she finds in the limitless language of painting.