Flowers Gallery presents Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2022), the latest project from American photographer Janelle Lynch. This series is comprised of diaphanous cyanotypes and striking, large-format black and white photographs produced during six weeks of solitude along the Atlantic Ocean in Amagansett, New York, at the end of 2022. Endless Forms Most Beautiful draws its title from the final lines of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, adopted by Lynch to describe “what may exist beyond” the material world of Darwin’s scientific text.
Lynch’s cyanotypes are physical recordings of natural elements: sea plants, an osprey wing and her own body, which she describes as “affirming the fundamental value of all life in its various manifestations, including the afterlife.” While insisting on the material, tangible presence of nature, the cyanotypes appear to allude to an extra-sensory realm. Citing spirit photography as an influence, the translucent, ephemeral presence of glowing forms and sprouting sea life appear to gesture to a sphere, Lynch writes, “beyond visual perception.” Three black-and-white large-format photographs extend these ideas. In a deviation from her career-long use of colour, Lynch’s compelling monochrome abstractions of coastal driftwood, flora and fauna reflect what she describes as “another kind of imagery that suggests essential matter and the celestial world.”
About Janelle Lynch
Based in New York, Janelle Lynch (born 1969) is an American large-format photographer with a 20-year career during which she has investigated themes of absence, presence, transcendence, and the life cycle through the landscapes and waterways of the United States, Mexico, and Spain.Lynch’s photographs are in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of the City of New York; New York Public Library; Brooklyn Museum; George Eastman Museum; and the New-York Historical Society. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including four one-woman museum shows: the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía (Mexico City); Southeast Museum of Photography (Daytona Beach, FL); Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY; and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY, where Another Way of Looking at Love is on view until 16 February 2020. Lynch has three monographs published by Radius Books, Los Jardines de México (2011), Barcelona (2013), and Another Way of Looking at Love (2013), which includes an essay by Darius Himes, International Head of Photographs, Christies. Her work has appeared in international publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Boston Globe, and Photograph Magazine.
Janelle Lynch : Endless Forms Most Beautiful
8 June – 1 July 2023
Flowers Gallery
82 Kingsland Road
London E2 8DP
www.flowersgallery.com
