Roseanne Lynch
No Want of Evidence

11 May – 08 July 2023

Curated by Pádraig Spillane

Official Exhibition Launch
From 5.00pm Saturday 13 May 2023

This exhibition of photographic works by Roseanne Lynch highlights her consideration of photography’s material and speculative edges. Her images record the compelling remnants of 20th century utopian movements through her residencies at various significant architectural sites in Europe and Canada. These connect with her non-representational images made through analogue practices and interventions on photographic surfaces. 

Lynch’s abstract and geometric images are created by harnessing tracings of light using darkroom processes explicitly showing the materials of photography. These photogram and luminogram works offer gradations of contrast showing the consequences of her making strategies with attention to the sensitivity of the paper surface, interactions with light and durations of exposure. Her investigations are combined with physical folding and crumpling of paper, which in turn create arrangements and concentrations of light and texture. Through material plays of space and volume, these abstract images are suggestive of complex yet seemingly effortless visual constructions.

These non-representational images work together with Lynch’s architectural documentary photographs from seminal modernist sites such as the Bauhaus Buildings and Bauhaus Buildings Research Archive, Dessau, Germany; Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France; the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (containing a model of the Banff National Park Pavilion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Francis Conroy Sullivan); and a unit of Charlotte Perriand’s kitchen from Le Corbusier’s Unité d'habitation. During her time at these locations, Lynch witnessed and documented these sites, their interiors and the objects they contain. Her images of modernist architectural design bring with them the ripple effect of their functional, idealistic and complicated histories. While adding to the network of architectural photographic documents, these works also explore the role such images have in social and collective thinking, the archive, and the creation of cultural memory. Her images act as visual prompts through the recognition of modernist identifiers showing the power of photography in shaping the visual history of modern architecture. 

Through making in abstract and documentary ways, Lynch’s work explores the peculiarity of photographic images in terms of what they allow to appear and the ways in which they stand in for what they represent. Her work considers the role of photography in the coding of social structures that create and maintain themselves through images. By engaging with the performative functions of the medium, this presentation of Lynch’s work shows how photographic transformation influences the production of cultural artefacts and collective imaginaries.

As a title, No Want of Evidence borrows words liberally from Rosalind Krauss's seminal text The Optical Unconscious to emphasise Lynch's engagement with the suggestive intensities photographic images hold.

Engagement Events

Dr Sabine Kriebel – Illustrated Talk 
Photo-poeisis: Reflections on Light’s Poetry
Offering a series of meditations on states of greyness, Dr Sabine Kriebel considers Roseanne Lynch’s photographic work in the context of the history of photographein, or writing with light. Dr Sabine Kriebel has written extensively about photography and photomontage. She teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at University College Cork and is the Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism.
From 3.00pm Saturday 13 May 2023
Photo Museum Ireland 

Panel discussion with Roseanne Lynch, Pádraig Spillane, Dr Sabine Kriebel & Darren Campion
This panel will consider various aspects of Roseanne Lynch’s explorative photographic practice including photography’s relationship with architecture, the space of photograms and the use of photographs.
From 3.45pm Saturday 13 May 2023
Photo Museum Ireland

Exhibition launch
From 5.00pm Saturday 13 May 2023
Photo Museum Ireland

GRAMMAR publication launch
Join us for the official launch of Roseanne Lynch’s new publication GRAMMAR. To mark the occasion we will be hosting a special in-conversation event with the artist and Darren Campion, Assistant Curator at Photo Museum Ireland. They will discuss the genesis of the project, the thinking behind it, and the process of producing this beautiful new publication.
6.00pm Thursday 15 June 2023
Photo Museum Ireland

Roseanne Lynch, Untitled [31.5.4] 2019, Graphite on Silver gelatin solarised unique print, 40x50cm

Limited edition artists’ prints are available in our photobook shop and online here. A full price list for the pieces in the exhibition is available here.

Artist Bio:
Roseanne Lynch is an Irish artist with an international exhibiting darkroom-based photography practice. Recent solo exhibitions include: Semblance, Lavit Gallery, Cork, (2022); GRAMMAR, Techne Sphere, Leipzig, (2021); Forgetting’s Trace, Irish Embassy, Berlin, (2020); La trace de l’oubli, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, (2019).

Her work is held in various collections including: The National Collection of Ireland; The Arts Council of Ireland Collection; Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau; UCC Art Collection, The Glucksman Gallery, Cork; The Office of Public Works State Art Collection; as well as significant national and international private collections.

Residencies include: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada; Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, Germany; Camargo Foundation International Fellowship Programme, Cassis, France; Cork Centre for Architectural Education, and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris. Roseanne is based in Cork, Ireland and lectures at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.

Curator Bio:
Pádraig Spillane is an artist, educator, and independent curator. Exhibitions he has curated include Contradictory Senses for Lismore Castle Arts; Roseanne Lynch, Semblance, Lavit Gallery; Kevin Mooney, Apparition, Sternview Gallery; Viviane Sassen, Parasomnia, Crawford Art Gallery with Stag & Deer. Pádraig lectures at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design.