Selected Exhibitions

Image: ‘Goat Woman’, by Breda Lynch, Cyanotype/Digital print 2018

And Still, Like Dust, I Rise

Opening Friday June 1^st from 6pm – 8pm
June 2^nd – July 6^th 2018 | Galway Arts Centre

curated by Vivienne Dick

Channeling the great poet Maya Angelou, we as women artists assert our rights as citizens of the world, our rights over our own bodies, our equal rights within the law, our right to speak, to legislate, to create, to write our own history, to have shelter and to live in a world free from war and violence.

This exhibition presents work from a diverse and intergenerational group of artists which speaks to ideas around female corporeality, autonomy, strength, and vulnerability. Our survival depends on our respect for this Earth and for women, who carry out the work of producing and sustaining life.

Maher’s work The Hind and La Mujer Sierpa find their origins in mythology and hybridity. Birnbaum’s video Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman’ radically deconstructs and manipulates a well -known female Pop icon. Eberstadt’s film plays with gender-queer images as does Lynch with her gothic fables and ironic take on power and the atomic bomb.

The work of Dick, Jurisic, Makela, Nolan and Prendergast addresses fragility, dislocation and the power of the moment, while Maiorana’s self -portrait focuses on nuances of structural and intimate violence. MacDonagh’s three -dimensional star shaped stones denote matter along with the abstract and the wider universe. A speculative post human future is intimated in Walsh’s sound installation and Adler’s images of an in-vitro female egg is reminiscent of a planet bombarded by asteroids.

A live event will take place on July 5th from 7 – 9pm to close the show with performance, music and film screenings featuring Ceara Conway, Lisamarie Johnson, Isabella Oberlander, Áine Phillips, Vicky Smith and others.

Witch and Lezzie

5th Oct – 5th Nov 2017

Ashford Gallery, RHA Dublin

Image: Signed limited edition ‘Bookcover’, (100 in the edition with 4 different covers).

Produced to coincide with Breda Lynch’s solo exhibition ‘Witch and Lezzie’ at the Ashford Gallery RHA Dublin. With the essay ‘Satan was a Lesbian‘ by Padraig Robinson. Design by Yin Yin Wong and production by Publication Studios, Rotterdam.

Fragments of a Lost Civilisation

19th Feb – 12 March 2016

Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co. Mayo

Abhainn Ri Festival 2015

27th June – 5th July – Macra Hall, Callan, Co.Kilkenny

Glitch: ‘Cash Rules Everything Around’

Rua Red Gallery, Dublin 2014

Glitch curated by Nora O’Murchu at Rua Red, Tallaght, Dublin, featured the work of three artists: Breda Lynch, Addie Wageknecht and Fergal Brennan. Lynch presented a drawing/vinyl installation titled: ‘Strangelove’ and a looped video on screen titled ‘The Pit’ .

The Pit and Other Stories

Solo exhibition at Siamsa Tire Arts Centre, Tralee, Co Kerry – 2014

Thursday’s Clinic

126 Gallery present: Breda Lynch | Thursday’s Clinic 09 February – 02 March 2013

The exhibition titled ‘Thursday’s Clinic’ presented new work specifically created for the 126 space, Galway. The body of work came about from a period of intensive research, which begun whilst on residency in the Cill Rialaig artist village in Kerry early in 2012. The photographs reference the language of hysteria as described in the extensive collection of photographs shot by 19th century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot at Saltpetriere Hospital in Paris of his medical muses. These postures and positions which articulated the distress of some of these women have subsequently been uncannily repeated in particular films, ‘Mother Joan of the Angels’, ‘The Exorcist’, ‘Possession’ and ‘The Snake Pit’. Here are depicted the same and similar postures of bizarre fits and spasms, paralysis of the limbs, inverted figures and faces, contortions and convulsions. Much of the horror in such films is predicated on threats to the body particularly the female body, either through its destruction, dissolution, convulsion, fragmentation, disempowerment or death. An early childhood memory of a dream sequence from the 1948 film ‘The Snake Pit’, became the focus of the presented video installation. Utilizing strategies of cinematic appropriation the presented video installation ‘The Pit’ uses the remembered sequence where the main character Virginia finds her self in the most chaotic ward in the asylum. This scene conjures up horror, which lies in the threat to humanity and humanness, both individual and collective. The destruction of self emblematized by loss of face and voice. The depictions of these bodies have histories; some motifs of posture and gesture are so persistent in visual culture as to suggest a valid trans-historicity, a kind of collective memory of forms.

“The body is always at risk of twisting from the human to the monstrous.” From“The Face of a Fiend: Convulsion, Inversion and the Horror of the Disempowered Body” by James Clifton. Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2011.

Strangelove

Solo exhibition with Black Mariah, Cork 2010

Song to the Siren

Solo exhibition at the Galway Arts Centre 2009

The exhibition ‘Song to the Siren’ is comprised of a body of new drawings and photographic works by Breda Lynch. This solo show explores and draws inspiration from areas of the Gothic that examine gender identity within art, literature, film and more contemporary influences such as Goth street style, music and subculture. It also includes a specially made for Galway Arts Centre video/sound installation titled ‘The Kiss’, which is a collaborative piece by Breda Lynch and Cork based artists Not Abel.

Other art works presented in ‘Song to the Siren’ are a series of drawings that celebrate the appearance and strength of image of 70’s Punk/Goth music icon Siouxsie Sioux to the street savvy girls in typical Goth, Post-Goth attire, which in turn describes a type of ‘freakish’ beauty or the display of physical appearance that assumes the position of ‘outsider’. Indeed the Goth sub-culture has been based on making the badge outsiderdom a proud rejection of conventional society. This series of drawings amalgamate these current dialogues with more historical areas of Gothic literature referring to descriptions of young women caught up in stituations about unrequited love, forbidden love, or doomed love scenarios for example ‘Carmilla’ by La Fanu or ‘Christabel’ by Coleridge

Lynch’s video/sound installation ‘The Kiss’ appropriates clips from the 1931 German b/w film ‘Madchen in Uniform’, which was deemed controversial at the time and was censored for various reasons. This inspired film based on a true story describes love that was considered dark or ill-advised – the ‘love that dares not speak its name’.