Lela Roy is a Los Angeles–based artist and modern-day folk visionary whose work revolves around one enduring muse: the horse. Blurring the lines between sacred relic and fever dream, her multidisciplinary practice includes painting, sculpture, assemblage, and the occasional slice of stale bread — all transformed into equine iconography using trash, beads, rhinestones, noodles, fabric, epoxy resin, and whatever else the universe happens to provide.
 

A former horse girl turned absurdity mystic, Lela draws creative power from the places where the holy meets the hilarious. Her work is rooted in a deep spiritual practice — shaped by a childhood in a Tibetan Buddhist household — but she doesn’t separate the sacred from the strange. Instead, she embraces absurdity as a divine force, treating glitter, garbage, and googly eyes with the same reverence as a ritual object.
 

Much of her horse art is a return to the raw joy of childhood — a place where horses symbolized freedom, wildness, and limitless imagination. Through her practice, she reconnects with that early awe, creating space to make art like a child again: with joy, intensity, and zero regard for traditional rules.
 

With a background as a wildlife biologist and a lifelong devotion to the natural world, her work also reflects ecological consciousness and an intimate relationship with the nonhuman world. In her teens and twenties, Lela was a singer-songwriter and frontwoman for multiple bands — and the punk rock ethos still runs through everything she makes.
 

Lela’s horse-centric body of work is devotional and chaotic, joyful and mythic — a celebration of what happens when you follow your weirdest instincts with full sincerity. Her pieces shimmer with contradiction: both sacred and silly, deeply personal and collectively archetypal. She invites viewers into a universe where ponies are oracles, trash is treasure, and absurdity is a spiritual path all its own.