Joanna Lynch (b. 1981, Surrey, UK) builds her expressive abstract works, through textural layers of paint and carbon, as visceral mediations on emotional complexity and human healing. She works on the studio floor, shifting between multiple paintings, intuitively drawing with thick swathes of paint and multi-size graphite sticks. Made over varying lengths of time, Lynch’s work is autopoietic and she is a conduit; the alternating mediums push and pull against each other until each painting intrinsically resolves itself.

The process acts a therapeutic channel, stifling self-awareness and allowing a subliminal response to surface. Often surprised by her own activity, she remains impartial to what comes, taking comfort in the catharsis and the emotional transience - through trepidation to elation and self-doubt to affirmation.

In a feverish language of its own, her gestural mark-making tells a subconscious story, and like the filled pages of a personal diary, each layer of energetic expression is a new entry - exposing, concealing and re-articulating a dynamic inner space. Lynch uses the notion of a frame, loosely painted or drawn at the edge her work, to contain the sensitive mess of a healing journey. Acting as a soothing safety net, the framing holds her vulnerability and provides a grounding window from which this ever-changing inner landscape can be viewed. 

Lynch graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2004 and lives and works in London.