Roseanne Lynch is based in Ireland, with an international research and exhibiting darkroom-based photography practice.

She moved temporarily to Leipzig in 2018 for a residency and 18-month engagement with The Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, resulting in a body of work entitled Grammar referencing Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten’s insistence that his students learn the grammar of their materials.

This ongoing work contributed to solo shows at Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris 2019 curated by Peggy-Sue Amison; Embassy of Ireland, Berlin 2020, curated by Nora Hickey M’shili, Techne Sphere, Leipzig 2021, curated by Margret Hoppe; Lavit gallery, Cork 2022, Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin curated by Pádraig Spillane 2023 and Adrian Bondy Galerie, Mind’s Eye, Paris 2024.

Her 64 page publication GRAMMAR, contains a text on Lynch’s photography practice in relation to the Bauhaus movement by Torsten Blume Artistic and Research Associate, and Curator of Bauhaus Foundation Dessau.

She is a lecturer in photography at MTU Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork.

Work is held in National and International collections, including The National Collection, The Arts Council of Ireland, The Office of Public Works, The Glucksman collection at University College Cork, The Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, Germany, the board of Ballarat International Fotofestival, Australia and Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris as well as national and international private collectors.

Artist Statement 2025
This ongoing body of work examines the phenomenology of photographic making through the principles of Bauhaus pedagogy. Originating during a 2018 residency at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, the work engages with Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, in which he encouraged students to “learn the grammar of their materials,” emphasising sensory awareness and material experimentation as routes to understanding form. This inquiry into the encounter between maker, material, and time forms the foundation of Grammar.

Initially focused on photographing Bauhaus architecture, the work evolved into a study of fundamental forms—the square, circle, and triangle—translated into darkroom processes such as luminograms, photograms, and prints from negatives. Through these cameraless techniques, the photographic surface becomes both an event and a trace, registering light, duration, and gesture. The use of graphite on the photographic surface further activates an encounter, merging drawing and photography into a shared field of tactile and temporal experience.

Developed with the support of the Arts Council of Ireland, Grammar reconsiders the photograph not as an image of an elsewhere but as an elsetime—a temporal and material presence. Each work’s title, indexed to the date and sequence of its making, underscores the photograph’s lived temporality and affirms the embodied awareness at the core of phenomenological experience.

GRAMMAR, a limited edition photobook, is available by contacting me through the form on the Contact section of this website, €57.00 plus postage. Limited edition of 15 signed books, with a signed hand printed silver print in a presentation box is also available €320 plus postage.
Edition of 400
Softcover
64 pages
173 x 212 mm
ISBN 9789083330808

RESIDENCIES
2020 - Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada
2020 Fundación´ace para el Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, (remote)
2018 - The Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau, Germany
Brelingen International Artist residency, Germany
2014 to 2017 - Cork Centre for Architectural Education
2015 - The Camargo foundation Cassis, France, International fellowship programme
2014 - Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
2011 - Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

PUBLICATIONS / REVIEWS
2023
GRAMMAR, designed by Hans Bol, printed by Robstolk, Amsterdam, supported by MTU, Cork arts office
and the Arts Council of Ireland.
Visual Artist Newsheet full page review of No Want of Evidence.

2019
Irish Arts Review Interview Sarah Kelleher
Visual Artist Ireland Interview by Padráig Spillane
Marianne Brandt Award catalogue, Grammar series
Poetry Ireland Issue 127, portfolio section

2017
Source Magazine, portfolio of Eloquent Proof,
Eloquent Proof New Irish Works publication, The Library Project, Temple Bar, Dublin

2016
Irish Times, Review of Eloquent Proof at Nag gallery by Aiden Dunne

2014
Enclave Review, Review of Infinite Line by Chris Clarke, curator Lewis Glucksman Gallery,
UCC COLLECTED, Review of Roseanne Lynch, Sternview gallery, by Dr Sarah Kelleher,
curator and writer

2013
New Irish Works PhotoIreland exhibition catalogue
Enclave Review, Review of Show, Catherine Harty visual artist
Source magazine review of Show as part of THERE THERE by Dr Pippa Little

1991
A Day In The Life Of Ireland, Collins Publishers, E d : Jennifer Ennwitt & Tom Lawlor

Excerpt Irish Arts Review, Winter 2019 Volume 36

Bauhaus
Roseanne Lynch’s images are an engagement with the act of seeing and the experience of light and space, writes Dr Sarah Kelleher

This formal experimentation has resulted in increasingly
complex works, where Lynch explores subtle transitions
between two and three dimensions, creasing, folding and
exposing the photographic paper or drawing on to the surface of a print to produce rich effects of tone and texture.

"That the photograph is not restrained behind glass, but is allowed extrude into the space and have that presence, is important to me as a strategy for emphasising the now-ness, or not elsewhere-ness, of the experience for the viewer.’

Dr Sarah Kelleher is a freelance curator, critic and art historian.

No Want of Evidence, The Museum of Photography, Meeting House Square, in Dublin’s Temple Bar, running 11th May – 8th July 2023, Curated by Pádraig Spillane.

Exhibition Statement excerpt by Pádraig Spillane

This exhibition of photographic works by Roseanne Lynch highlights her consideration of photography’s material and speculative edges. Her images record the compelling remnants of 20th century utopian movements through her residencies at various significant architectural sites in Europe and Canada. These connect with her non-representational images made through analogue practices and interventions on photographic surfaces.

Her non-representational images work together with Lynch’s architectural documentary photographs from seminal modernist sites such as the Bauhaus Buildings and Bauhaus Buildings Research Archive, Dessau, Germany; Eileen Gray’s modernist villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France; the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (containing a model of the Banff National Park Pavilion designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Francis Conroy Sullivan); and a unit of Charlotte Perriand’s kitchen from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation. During her time at these locations, Lynch witnessed and documented these sites, their interiors and the objects they contain.

As a title, No Want of Evidence borrows words liberally from Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text The Optical Unconscious to emphasise Lynch’s engagement with the suggestive intensities photographic images hold.

Pádraig Spillane is an artist, curator and educator based in Ireland