Rebecca Byrne
When the Ground Dreams
I’ve thought about the natural evolutions in our planet, what things should naturally disappear, and what things are being accelerated by our own relationship to the world. I started researching extinct plants, mushrooms, trees, the invisible network underneath our feet, and then kept coming back to the studio and making these fantastical landscapes.
Rebecca Byrne invites us into landscapes where the experience of turbulence becomes a language. These are sites of discovery as the shapes, colors, and textures of the ground beneath our feet dissolve into the uncanny.
When the Ground Dreams gathers vivid paintings and works on paper by Byrne that chart otherworldly ecologies. Her subjects are anchored in natural forms. Flora drawn from her lived experiences are situated alongside those that have undergone a surreal metamorphosis. In each electric-tinged knot of a tree or twisting outstretched limb, she illuminates nature’s regenerative force.
Byrne’s use of vibrant color, notably a neon-like pink and fiery orange that starkly contrasts her tranquil blue tones, weaves itself into each piece. Compositions are transformed into dreamlike scenes. With layered marks of watercolor, pastel, and acrylic, the wild we know is disrupted.
These are not concrete depictions of place; rather, Byrne constructs maze-like terrains, continually in transition. They flourish in the space between what is real and what is illusion, of figuration and abstraction. Her swirling gestures allow the buried systems, structures, and interconnectedness of the planet to come alive.
The viewer is enveloped in environments of magical realism. Perceptions of existence and time are intensified by a need for survival within the mystical ecologies that emerge. Topographies where the familiar fades, we are left awestruck by the fragile beauty of our ever-changing earth.
In making visible cycles of loss and instability, a collision of physical and interior worlds, we witness how an end also marks a beginning. Her speculative habitats remind us that even in states of discomfort, we leave room for the possibility of renewal to take root.
I’ve been reading about how trees are connected to each other underground via Mycelium which create a network for trees to communicate. The idea of a community under our feet is something I find comforting as I reflect on the future of the environment, and I also find the longevity of trees fascinating. I imagine all the people who have come and gone and, through it all, the forest has endured.
About the Artist
Rebecca Byrne is an artist and curator working primarily in drawing and painting. Born in Chicago in 1968, she completed her MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2012.
Color fills her imaginative natural landscapes. Her paintings and drawings balance abstraction and figuration, observation and creativity, life and death, guided by subtle, intuitive precision.
The artist works with pencil, colored pastels, oil, and acrylic to create expressive, tactile marks. Her ethereal scenes, populated with living and extinct plants, flowers, and trees, celebrate the richness of form and color in the natural world.
Byrne lives and works in London.
Artworks
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Rebecca Byrne A Cloak of Adaptation (2024)
Watercolour, gesso… (framed)(h) 40 x (w) 30 cm
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Rebecca Byrne Haptic Feedback (2024)
Acrylic, gesso… (framed)(h) 40 x (w) 30 cm
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Rebecca Byrne Hole Trying to be Whole (2024)
Watercolour, gesso… (framed)(h) 40 x (w) 30 cm
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Rebecca Byrne Most of the time I think we re ok (2025)
Watercolour, gesso, acrylic…(h) 56 x (w) 76 cm
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Rebecca Byrne Spinning the Thread of Life (2024)
Acrylic, gesso… (framed)(h) 40 x (w) 30 cm
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Rebecca Byrne They drank silently from Urdswell (2024)
Acrylic, gesso… (framed)(h) 40 x (w) 30 cm
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Rebecca Byrne Walking in the Garden of Turbulence (2025)
Acrylic and pastel on canvas(h) 70 x (w) 60 cm each
Related Exhibitions
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Whitney Biennial 2026: America Without Easy Answers
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