Curated Projects
Other Drawings
George Bolster, Jenny Keane, Ins Kromminga, Breda Lynch, Kieran Moore.
Ormston House Limerick 2012
Curated by Breda Lynch
Exhibited were artworks by five artists who have made drawing a central part of their artistic practice. All artists featured engaged in creating poetic expressions of otherness, which queried definitions of sexuality, subverted normative ideals and explored attributes of liminal personae. The medium of drawing was realized with both modesty and ambition, from the small, precise and intimate sketch, to drawing as installation that interacted with the gallery space and drawing as performative spectacle.
These artists are based in New York, Belfast, Berlin and Limerick.
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A Poem of Friendship
Occupy Space presents ‘A Poem of Friendship’, an exhibition of work by Daniel Kane, Breda Lynch and Padraig Robinson. This exhibition presents artwork from three artists of three different generations that specifically explore themes around queer identity and lifestyles, sexual interaction and gay history.
Curated by Breda Lynch at Occupy Space Limerick 2010
Essay: ‘Indecipherable Yearning of (the) Soul’ by Dr Jenny Keane (click to open PDF)
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Darkness Visible
Curated by Ann Mulrooney and Breda Lynch
Exhibiting artists: George Bolster, Andy Harper, Angela Huntbach, Breda Lynch, Alice Maher, Eoin McHugh, Ann Mulrooney, Ailbhe Ni Bhriain, Kate Street.
Commissioned by the Galway Arts Centre and Galway Arts Festival 2008
Catalogue produced by Galway City Arts Office for the Galway Arts Centre 2008
Interview with the Vampyre – Breda Lynch and Dr Kieran Cashell in conversation, included in the Darkness Visible catalogue 2008.
Darkness Visible circa review by Dr Fergal Gaynor – Printed in Circa Art Magazine 2008
Exhibition toured to Cavan and Limerick, supported by Cavan County Council, Belltable Arts Centre/Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick 2009.
“If, for Freud, the Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained…secret and hidden but has come to light, then Hanna Arendt’s description…is a profoundly unhomely one; ‘It is the distinction between things that should be hidden and things that should be shown’” – Homi K Bhaba, The Location of Culture
Architecturally, ornament is considered decadent when its function no longer serves the form it is intended to adorn. Ornament is always opposed to the Classical position. It is always allied with the illogical, the irrational. It arises out of the domination of nature by form, yet nature never quite relinquishes its sensuality. Although it is always subdued or controlled, there is always the possibility of uprising. It is like a mutinous subject, momentarily quelled.
The use of ornament in the work of the artists in this grouping is not tied to the service of form, but used a means of expression in its own right. There is a constant tension in the formal restraint and pulling back of pattern and line and the outward push of longing into complex ornament. The line of ornament unfolds within that ‘tenebrous hinterland’ of things that should be hidden and things that should be shown; a complex, baroque unfolding of line as boundary where an object or idea meets that which is its Other, that which it is not – the boundary being, as Bhaba and Heidegger posit, the point at which presencing begins, rather than ends.
That counterpoint of restraint and expression results in works where the use of ornament and beauty is a call to see the Other that lies beneath the surface. The beauty becomes unsettling in its suggestions of the uncanny, of abjection, of aspiration or nostalgia. The work self-consciously exists in the realm of the Gothic and the Romantic, where ornament does not serve to decorate but is instead an external manifestation of darker inner forces.
DARKNESS VISIBLE is ostensibly a drawing show, but in the broadest understanding of the word. It brings together a group of artists whose work explores the nuances of the ornamental line through a variety of media, including video, sculpture, photography and drawing.
