Shane Lynam: Pebbledash Wonderland

24 August - 12 October 2024

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the world premiere of Shane Lynam’s new work Pebbledash Wonderland. Lynam skillfully captures the essence of built environments. Through a unique visual vocabulary, Shane's work becomes a powerful tool for critical reflection on the history and purpose of public spaces.

Having moved around a lot since my childhood, I found myself back living in Dublin in 2012 and slowly realised that I would be spending an indefinite period of my life here. I have been negotiating my relationship with the city ever since. This has involved obsessively photographing as much of the fabric of the city as I can. By returning over and over to the same sites and almost deconstructing the space, I then look to put these fragments back together to suggest an alternative representation of the city, somewhere between reality and my own experience. The work intends to challenge popular visual representations of the post-crisis period in Dublin by emphasising the subjective experience and how it can be reflected in the texture and physicality of the built environment. 

– Shane Lynam

Shane was awarded a two-year Photo Museum Ireland Exhibition Residency in 2024. His work is included in the Archive of Irish Contemporary Photography - our National Collection securing artists’ archives for the future. Click here to view an interview with Shane recorded for the archive.

Artist Biography:

Shane Lynam (b. 1980) is an Irish photographer based in Dublin. His first book, Fifty High Seasons, was published in 2018. He is represented by Galerie Bertrand Grimont in Paris who presented his work at Paris Photo and exhibited Fifty High Seasons in 2019. He won the Gallery of Photography Solas award in 2015 and the Curtin O'Donoghue RHA award in 2018. He was selected for a residency at the Irish Cultural Centre Paris in 2019 which included an exhibition at the Centre. He was the recipient of the Arts Council Visual Arts Bursary Award in 2022. By spending prolonged periods photographing built environments and overlooked public spaces, and weaving the images together to create intuitive narratives, he looks to provide a fresh perspective on how we regard public spaces.