13 September - 18 October 2025 / Tessa Lynch / Arena
- Admin
- Jul 2
- 4 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Tessa Lynch's solo exhibition Arena features new and repositioned artworks. Known for her material allusiveness, Lynch’s work critically reflects on urban life crafting scenarios that are both humorous and unsettling.
Exhibition dates: September 13 - October 18 2025
Private view: Friday 12 September (6-8pm)
Tessa Lynch’s artworks have a particular graphic quality. They are direct and deadpan; materially precise (a riff on macho minimalism, perhaps) and subtlety expressive. From site-specific sculpture through to performance, print and more, Lynch favours a way of making where ideas guide form. It's a discursive process, a conversation or collaboration not only with the world built all around us, thinking how this can be refracted, but with the bodies that share this space. Bubbling with a sense of humour, Lynch’s artworks re-chart the emotional impact of the structures we are surrounded by, prompting the question who designs are these for?
In the emerging artist's second solo exhibition with Patricia Fleming Gallery (Glasgow), Lynch presents three bodies of work. Wipe Clean: The Scots Magazine (2023) was originally made as part of her collaboration with Rachel Adams (Gabe Care) for the Travelling Gallery’s exhibition ‘High on the Summit Ridge’. Constructed from five mirror panels, each adorned with cloth mark smears and ads abstracted from The Scots magazine (‘a glossy monthly magazine that brings Scotland to life in all its glory’), the work recalls the process of obscuring shop windows through the application of white paint. In this way, the work haunts industrial redevelopment, revealing the ideology that underscores much urban regeneration.
Lynch’s new series of chalk drawings Play Panels (2025) each depicts a balloon-like figure squashed within the confines of a black box. Smiling with a child-like naivety, these creatures recall the overscaled marionettes that accompany crowd pleasing parades. Far from being wistful or toothless, the fragile nature of these drawings instanciates a feeling of dispair Lynch associates with the current political condition — a state of affairs where those in positions of power make play things of us.
The sculptural work Through (2025) has emerged from Lynch’s ongoing dialogue with artist-researcher Jenny Richards. It resonates with the concept of the flâneuse, described by Lauren Elkin as “a determined, resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Since 2014, Lynch and Richards have explored various cities on foot, often discussing themes such as the deindustrialization of urban spaces and the alternative forms of labor that have emerged in response. They also examine the experience of navigating the city with young children and how parenting has reshaped their creative practices, highlighting that much of the work involved in parenthood is both highly creative and largely unnoticed.Throughs translates snippets of these conversations into visual forms, positioning them upon a curved structure which resembles the advertisement boards found in subway stations. In this way, Throughs presents us with visual whispers of a feminist critique, suggesting that liberation can be discovered through a thoughtful re-examination of the everyday systems that surround us.
For all enquiries please contact gallery@patirica-fleming.com
Artist biography
Tessa Lynch (b. 1984, Surrey) lives and works between Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Education: Lynch received a BA Hons in Tapestry from Edinburgh College of Art in 2007, which included an exchange to Kyoto Saga University of the Arts, Japan. In 2013 she received a MFA from Glasgow School of Art.
Select exhibitions: Rembrandt to Rego: The Printmaker’s Art, Scottish National Gallery Edinburgh (UK), 2023-24; Houses Fit For People, Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh (UK), 2022; Made on the Table with Rhona Warwick Paterson, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (UK), 2022; ‘You’re Never Done’, with Gabecare, Glasgow International, Glasgow (UK), 2021; My Kid Could’ve Done That, The Holbourne Museum, Bath (UK), 2021; Tapestry: Changing Concepts, City Art Centre, Edinburgh (UK), 2021; ‘Stoop, Stoop, Stooping is Stoopid!’, House For an Art Lover, Glasgow (UK), 2019; Gardener, Patricia Fleming Projects, Glasgow (UK), 2019; Affinity and Allusion (Including Turns, permanent public sculpture), Collective, Edinburgh (UK) 2018; It Takes A Village, Humber Street Gallery, Hull (UK) 2018; Soft Cells – Uncanny Loop curated by Transit Arts as part of the Glasgow Short Film Festival (UK) 2018; The Driver’s Seat, Cubitt London (UK) 2018; Frieze London with Frutta, Rome (London) (UK), 2017; L-Shaped Room, Spike Island, Bristol (UK), 2017; NOW, National Galleries Scotland, Modern One, Edinburgh (UK), 2017; Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its flavour (On the bedpost overnight)? J Hammond Projects, London (UK), 2017; Wave Machine, David Dale, Glasgow (UK), 2016; Trigger Words, Glasgow Print Studios, Glasgow (UK), 2016; Green Belt, Whitstable Biennale, Kent (UK), 2016; Painter’s Table, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow for Glasgow International Director’s Programme (UK), 2016; Condo, London with Frutta, Rome (London) (UK), 2016; That’s Genetic, 16 Nicholson St, Glasgow (UK), 2015; Over, Over, Over, Simone de Sousa, Detroit (USA), 2015.
Collections:
Edinburgh University Collection
National Galleries Scotland
Glasgow Museums
British Council Touchstones collection Rochdale
Lynch’s practice consists of sculpture, print and performance. Her artworks are often designed to offer feminist readings of cities, highlighting issues of social reproduction that are at odds with contemporary art. Favouring an ambitious scale, Lynch likens gallery spaces to urban brownfield site — areas ripe for new development. The research that underpins her work is carried out in a participatory fashion, often collaborating with community groups, architects and writers.
In 2019 Lynch developed a collaborative art practice with Rachel Adams, working under the name Gabecare.
Gallery Opening Times: Wed-Sat, 12 - 5 pm
Directions: Patricia Fleming Gallery, Oxford House, 4 Oxford Lane, Glasgow, G51 9EP (Central Station 10 mins walk, Bridge St and St Enoch Subway 5 mins walk).
Access
The gallery threshold has three steps and two grab rails. An alternative front door with two low steps and temporary ramp is available at 3 Oxford Lane, please call us to use this door, someone will meet you.
We regret that there are no wheelchair-accessible toilets within the gallery. A wheelchair-accessible toilet is available at St Enoch Centre or at Central Station.