Imagined Worlds in Charnwood Museum

Charnwood Museum in Loughborough is playing host to an exhibition of painting and poems by Mary Byrne, entitled Imagined Worlds. This morning I had the chance to pay it a visit.


Artist Mary Byrne

 

Mary, who is based in Loughborough, works in acrylic and mixed media. Narrative is the connecting thread that runs through the exhibition. Several paintings depict characters from Greek Myth. Others seem to be items of evidence, carrying the suggestion of a story just out of our sight.

The theme of flying or wanting to fly is repeated in several of the images. A woman balances on a flying carpet, doves escape from an opened suitcase. Greek artisan Daedalus is re-imagined as a contemporary young woman, sometimes wearing wings. In one image she checks her mobile phone, perhaps between flights. In another she is wingless, focussed on the distance, so intent on the thought of becoming airborne that its impossibility has become unimportant.

That wingless image kept drawing me back. The act of flying seems to stand in for the act of creation. Don’t we all set out to fly when we sit down to write?    

Mary’s exhibition “Imagined Worlds” runs until 27^th April 2014.