Shane Lynam – Pebbledash Wonderland

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the premiere of Shane Lynam's Pebbledash Wonderland, a photographic account of his adopted home city, Dublin. The exhibition builds on Lynam’s long-term engagement with urban space across Europe, pushing his practice in new subjective and narrative directions. Pebbledash Wonderland is Lynam's second major body of work and follows on from his acclaimed book, Fifty High Seasons, about modernist French resorts, published in 2018.

Returning to Dublin in 2012, Lynam began an intensive process of mapping his encounters with the streets and buildings that make up the city’s varied architectural environment. Spanning Ireland’s post-crisis years, and extending into the current era of multinational fuelled economic expansion, he captures a time of profound transformation in Dublin as new construction disrupts established neighbourhoods and communities.

However, Pebbledash Wonderland is not a polemic on development. Formed by the repeated, linked actions of walking and photographing, the work is a fundamentally personal, intuitive representation of the city, reflecting Lynam’s dual position as observer and participant. By evoking the intangible sense of being present in the city, he acts as a witness to change, communicated through the multiple textures of place.

Lynam offers a timely reminder that the complex elements of a contemporary city are almost impossible to grasp in their entirety but must be felt, lived, and recorded, in small, seemingly insignificant moments. Returning over and over to the same sites, Lynam obsessively photographed the city to create a series of subjective, abstracted spaces that sit somewhere between reality and his own experience.

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Artist Biography:

Shane Lynam (b. 1980) is an Irish photographer based in Dublin. His work is a sustained exploration of the multi-layered ways the built environment shapes the lived experience of those who dwell there. Lynam’s first book, Fifty High Seasons, was published in 2018. He is represented by Galerie Bertrand Grimont in Paris who presented his work at Paris Photo in 2019. Shane was awarded the Visual Arts Bursary Award in 2022, the Curtin O’Donoghue RHA award in 2018, The Gallery of Photography Solas award in 2015 and selected for a residency at the Irish Cultural Centre Paris in 2019. He has been an Artist-in-Residence for 18 months at Photo Museum Ireland - as part of their artist’s art form development programmes. This has supported the development of this work for exhibition and book publication. His work is held in Photo Museum Ireland’s Collection.Alongside working on personal projects, Shane lectures at TU Dublin and Griffith College Dublin.