We Shake with Joy, We Shake with Grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
- Mary Oliver
The verses of the poem We Shake with Joy, We Shake with Grief are the introductory key to the inner quest which Sammi Lynch externalizes in her works.
Just as Oliver often does with her poems, Lynch bases her paintings on the first hand experience of being in the natural world. As she translates and reinterprets the continuous flow of encounters with specific landscapes and wilderness, what emerges is a response that is more universal and speaks to bigger themes.
Lynch’s oil paintings are the final part of the work; she starts from drawings created en plein air where she gives figure to emotions and sensations that move between a state of calm, turbulence, and disquiet. These feelings that she collects and expresses through her lyricism reflect the existence of the human being, who in the face of the natural world, is alternatingly absent, marginally integrated, or fully absorbed. Perhaps here she gets closer to a truth, a truth that the landscape constantly gives back to her.
Journeys through mountains form the inspiration for much of the work in the current show: carving a pathway through a mountain is a metaphor as fertile as the valleys from which its peaks ascend. The works presented in this exhibition were created by Lynch following a turbulent period of her life and as she begins to transition towards a place of relative calm and reflection. The physical reality of a mountain’s existence contextualises our worldly problems - rendering them manageable, whilst the symbolic dimensions of a mountain journey speak to the emotional changeability of our lives. But the motif of a mountain pilgrimage captures something more nuanced than a straightforward resolution or casting off of the past. Moving through mutating landscapes, the changing light and weather conditions, and walking against the coming of darkness are as much an immersion in the world’s being as a sense of progress against it. Yet, climbing a mountain is a journey with a purpose, and being at a mountains’ summit thus provides a new sense of perspective. From its peaks one glimpses the topography of the landscape and can chart pathways forged by others across and up the different peaks and crags. And so, the journey begins again.
Although the paintings in We Shake with Joy, We Shake with Grief use the natural world as a cypher for human experience and emotion, those experiences gestured toward are principally deep yet impermeable connections to landscape and place. The painting Now I am a Lake, for instance, calls forth a sense of identity with the plant in the foreground: Its upright form with appended limbs is a human-like figure that allows the viewer to see themselves reflected in the landscape. At the same time, the lake in the background, which is cast in a similar light to the anthropomorphic shrub, pulls the viewer in allowing one to recognise themselves in it. This double reflection draws more meaning from the painting’s construction, which hybridised two landscapes, one from the artists’ home and one from further afield, as a contemplation on change.
The exhibition is a collection of six canvases and three drawings that constitute an exploration of space, texture and light, surface and depth. For Lynch, the artistic process begins by finding herself immersed in nature, where scenes and moments are depicted in drawings. In the studio these fleeting impressions are translated into paintings and prints, allowing Lynch to work productively with the tension between the immediacy of perception and the drawn out act of contemplating, evoking, and reminiscing on a landscape or situation. In combining her drawings with a dedicated formal process, colours become more vivid, space becomes flattened, and forms are simplified. The paintings and prints which emerge are at times a conversation, a negotiation, or tension between the surface of the canvas and a sense of pictorial depth. Often the artworks maintain a sense of the organic in which formal process and memory work together to produce landscapes which we find ourselves pondering as somehow familiar. In this way, the artworks enhance different points on a continuum between perception and memory, form and colour, surface and depth. (VVB)
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We Shake with Joy, We Shake with Grief.
What a time they have, these two
housed as they are in the same body.
- Mary Oliver
The verses of the poem We Shake with Joy, We Shake with Grief are the introductory key to the inner quest which Sammi Lynch externalizes in her works.
Just as Oliver often does with her poems, Lynch bases her paintings on the first hand experience of being in the natural world. As she translates and reinterprets the continuous flow of encounters with specific landscapes and wilderness, what emerges is a response that is more universal and speaks to bigger themes.
Lynch’s oil paintings are the final part of the work; she starts from drawings created en plein air where she gives figure to emotions and sensations that move between a state of calm, turbulence, and disquiet. These feelings that she collects and expresses through her lyricism reflect the existence of the human being, who in the face of...
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