Work by Sheila Lynch presented as part of Sympoiesis, an online symposium hosted by Transart Institute for Creative Research, August 2020.
Media include photographs, paintings, drawings, assemblage, video, and digitally manipulated drawings, paintings and photographs.
My practice is a study of the porous edges in nature and my body, of blurred and layered boundaries, of internal and external energies.
Special thanks to Taylore Wilson of Transart Institute for Creative Research for her technical support with this presentation.
I am drawn to spaces in nature and to Chicago’s southern lake shore. I wander. Often, when I let go of intention and stay present with my body, something is revealed – in even the most faint trace or impression. The spaces in-between or gaps, where reality is unclear or altered, are where I investigate. I examine porous edges in nature and my body.
Recent research included surrealism, animism and mirror-touch synaesthesia. Over the past year I absorbed and engaged with the work of Ana Mendieta, Gabriel Orozco, Sean Scully, Nicholas Estevez, Anna Daucikova, Susan Weil, Fayen d’Evie, Rene’ Magritte, Ruth Asawa, David Whyte and Sinead Morrisey. In their works I feel a jarring or shaking of the ordinary, of finding the extraordinary in the everyday.
I examine my body as a filter, to understand what is revealed in exploring porousness and the edges.
I am conscious that much of what I know comes through my body. I experience internal energy movement as I absorb and release external energies. The flow of energy is always changing.
My boundaries sometimes disappear. These examples reflect my sense of merging with ambiguous grasses, roots and dirt at the waters edge. There is an inward and outward flow of energy and a release, sometimes explored through burns.
Walking Sketches
Yielding to my body means my edges can disappear sometimes, allowing other energies to flow through me in these unknown, uncertain explorations. I yield like the shore does to the waves breaking against it. And like the shore, I am altered by this process of yielding to my own porousness.
Following three sketch videos are intended to be run simultaneously.