(selected by Andrew Patrizio)
Diptych - paper & wire, 2005
'Sarah Lynch's studio-based photography crafts one of the most playful yet intense areas of contemporary art photography'. (Charlotte Cotton). The photographs are documents of the sculptural forms that she builds, shot at the end of time-consuming studio labours at the moment where 'everything becomes a single, magical entity, and before it falls apart'. (1) Miniature sculptures - composed of wire, thread, paper and small fruits - are tenuously balanced and suspended within a space suggestive of a vast empty landscape, 'borne out of a close and careful construction of causal links between these elements'. (2)
Sarah Lynch: 'My work is concerned with the philosophy of being, it expresses, documents and questions issues concerning our existence and our 'self'. My intention was to show how minute transformations can shift everything into a different realm. I am trying to bring everything into question, how temporary everything is and our ultimate lack of control, but most importantly to draw attention to the beauty of the fragility in which we exist. I want my photographs to be a reminder of how we exist in a total, ever changing environment and not soley as individual entities'.
In an essay profiling the 'SuspendedReality' series Charlotte Cotton writes, 'Lynch uses a poised and seamless photographic style to counter the physicality of the structures she creates. The tabletop and wall backdrop in which Lynch positions her sculptures is softly focussed and simplified. She edits out the specificity of the studio space and transforms the site with the visual suggestion of a landscape scene.
The division of the table and wall becomes that, pictorially, between land and sky. The size of her prints (44 x 36 inches) emphasises the relationship being struck with landscape painting, the fruits now enlarged so as to lose their own specificity of scale. Concomitantly, the horizon in the 'landscape' is also a cut or a line through the images.
This capacity for an object or set of relationships to be both three dimensional (and sculptural) as well as two-dimensional (and linear) is a process that also unfolds in Lynch's photographs. The hooks and bent wires of the sculptures are simultaneously the tensed supports of the fruits and the graphic sweeps and punctuations across the photograph's surfaces. The enlarged fruits become both ripe forms as well as luscious blocks of colour'. (3)
Biography
Sarah Lynch graduated in Photography at Edinburgh College of Art in 2003. She has exhibited widely in the UK and her photographs have been published in international art journals. In 2004 she was awarded a Jerwood Photography Award and during 2005 exhibited in the Jerwood Space, London, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordonstone, Dundee.
She lives and works in Edinburgh.
(1 - 3) Charlotte Cotton, 'Sarah Lynch: Suspended Realities', Portfolio, Issue 39, May 2004, p. 37.
