Instagram: @elysiabyrd
Statement:
Led by an investigation into the liminal energies contained within the natural world, my practice explores landscape as a site for healing and transformation beyond human-centric perspectives.
Through habitual acts of meditation and walking there is an unlocking of ideas; an opening up to the potentialities of cosmic thinking and envisioning. Flickering ideas collected through these practices are earthed back down through drawing, forming the first thoughts of a painting.
The very act of painting is for me a search toward the idea, journeying to discover the image and the narrative contained within. Just as walking is the act to find narrative contained within the land, it is the act of re-telling through paint which allows these stories to live and morph.
The paintings seek to find something other than a naturalistic representation of landscape. Speaking to an animism where everything in the land is alive and has a spirit. Amalgamated real experiences are brought together with the unreal, perpetuated by the saccharine palette. Specific features such as precipices, caves, wells and waterways are portals between this world and another. Aiming to signify moments of change in the usual thread of things which lead to encounters with magical beings, energy channels and blasts from entities.
Residencies in Alto Paraíso and Spinneri Leipzig, began my engagement with the esoteric, folklore and myth which have now filtered more specifically but not limited to those surrounding the British Isles. Ideas of land-consciousness are harnessed through non-rational methods of being such as Reiki and sacred practices, bringing knowledge that we are entangled within an ever-evolving cosmic body.
Short texts developed acting as jumping off points for possible routes through the paintings.
