Selected Exhibitions

Fragments of a Lost Civilisation

19th Feb – 12 March 2016

Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co. Mayo

Opened by artist and Aosdana member Alice Maher on 19th of Feb 2016

Essay written for the exhibition titled ‘Satan was a Lesbian’ by artist Padraig Robinson

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’.