Bairon was born in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1947. As a child she moved with her family to Montevideo, where she spent her childhood and teenage years, and where she began her artistic career. She studied painting there, at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, and Chinese painting at the National Library. Aged twenty, a further move brought her to Buenos Aires, where she carried on studying, first ceramics and later engraving. In those days, the lines of her lithographs recalled Chinese painting. In the 1980s, she devoted herself to set design and made costumes, objects, and backdrops for plays by the poet and playwright, Emeterio Cerro, a representative of the excess of the Buenos Aires underground scene of the day. This was when her oriental lightness and silence started to connect with the experimentation of 1980s theatre productions. The lines that before stretched over the paper gained volume to become small reliefs bordering on the decorative by incorporating mouldings and colourful ornaments made of plaster, paper pulp, and felt. Hardly any record of these works survives.

En Sin título, Elba Bairon, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, 2023.