Shari Gasper
Lelia Byron: Artist uses vibrant paintings to translate dream fragments
July 11, 2022
I became interested in the idea of narrative art as a language to tell a story...I like the investigative process, interviewing other people and the research aspect. There’s a journalistic process to my art.
Seven dramatic paintings on display in Overture’s Gallery I draw you into the dreams of artist Lelia Byron. You’ll sense Byron’s feelings of loss and isolation along with hope and wonder, emotions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
An interdisciplinary artist, Byron responded to what was happening during the tumultuous months of the global lockdown through painting.
“It was a good time for self-reflection,” said Byron, a New York native who moved to Madison in 2019. “I kept a detailed record of my dreams, documenting mood, color, smells, fragments of my memories.”
Using a vibrant color palette, she translated the often fleeting and nonsensical sensations into images to convey the ideas and temperament of her dreams. The paintings are part of Overture Galleries’ Iridescent Windows exhibition on display through Sunday, Sept. 4.
Byron has been interested in the creative process since a young age and especially loved participating in drawing adventures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as a child. In high school, there weren’t any art classes offered, but Byron participated in a museum summer printmaking program for public school students where her enthusiasm for creating exploded.
She pursued the arts in college, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., and a Master’s in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Her most memorable class focused on documentary storytelling, in which students explored how to tell stories through art.
“I became interested in the idea of narrative art as a language to tell a story,” said Byron. “I like the investigative process, interviewing other people and the research aspect. There’s a journalistic process to my art.”
This narrative essence is obvious in her works. In addition to paintings, Byron creates murals, sculptures, installations and public art projects. This summer, she is in Rauma, Finland, working on a mural project about lace making. Her research involves interviewing lace makers, getting to know the community and participating in the annual lace festival.
She completed an earlier series of paintings about women growing coffee in Huila, Colombia, in early 2020. The paintings showcase the patterns and cycles of both nature and the coffee growing process.
Byron consistently explores materials, approaches and stories. In her project “Plastic Dreams: Sunrise and Sunset,” an outdoor sculpture made from recycled plastic, she collected hundreds of pounds of plastic, sorted it by type and color, then shredded it and molded the pieces into 300 individual parts with a do-it-yourself manual injection machine. The sculpture is on display in Messejana, Portugal.
“There was a lot of experimenting to figure out the best ways to reuse the plastic,” she said. “It is not that easy to do.”
Byron believes that a career as an artist can be challenging, and she is always looking for opportunities to share her work. She is grateful to be a part of Overture Galleries’ spring/summer cycle.
“Overture Galleries is really a great space to share art. It is a meeting point for all these creative fields where many types of art come together,” she said. “It’s important for Madison to have this creative space, free and open to the public, where art can take place and people can be a part of it.”
For Byron, art is a gathering point for new audiences and new connections, inspiring people to reimagine and think differently.
“Art can express a topic in a new way,” she said. “It’s a way of communicating with many diverse people, building bridges.”
Byron fans can see more of her work in August at the Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, where she is curating an environmental exhibition with accompanying interactive events, and next spring in a solo exhibition of paintings and sculptures about “home” at the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio.
“It’s exciting as an artist to share my work, engage with other people and help them be inspired,” she said.