Boyd’s artwork aims to create a space believable enough for viewers to imagine being in it. Initially, she paints a realistic environment with a solid structure featuring everyday furniture. Gradually, she rearranges the space to make it more theatrical and surreal. Each painting depicts a carefully created set that aims to bridge the gap between reality and Boyd’s fabricated, dreamlike world.
For Days Paintings (2020)
In this series of work, Boyd depicts shapes and forms that are suggestive of figures coming together in times of care or need. Despite beginning work on the series before the COVID pandemic, Boyd’s series reflects on the claustrophobia and isolation illness can cause in everyday life.
Boyd’s ‘For Days Paintings’ (2020) considers tender interactions between people and how it feels to be in, or become aware of, one’s body. Boyd’s artwork aims to conjure feelings of self-awareness in viewers while capturing the strangeness of the world.
Signal Paintings (2022)
Boyd’s ‘Signal Paintings’ (2022) are a series of works she made for a solo exhibition at Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco. The colourful paintings are all made from oil on canvas and linen, and range between smaller canvases of 15.7 × 19.7 inches and larger canvases of 70.9 × 82.7 inches.
For this series of paintings, Boyd examines themes of desire, care, and support structures. She is interested in depicting different types of relationships like familial and romantic connections. Boyd conveys human intimacies in her work by giving physical form and colour to things like bodily sensations of touch, pain, and pressure or sensory movements like breathing, heartbeat, and blood flow.
Despite being invisible to the eye, Boyd captures the human body’s peripheral energy on canvas using expressive shapes and deep colours like blood-red and greenish-yellow.
In her painting The Train (2022), Boyd uses the visceral impact of colour to create a narrative. The sickly yellow-green background represents a bodily yet toxic fluid, while the red spots in between the two figures represent cells and flowers. Boyd’s paradox between disease and ornament gives form and colour to our internal body. By doing so, she provokes in us an ability to visualise the invisible.
