‘Hellbound’, is an art exhibition by Breda Lynch. This show at GOMA Waterford, presents new art work that has not been presented in public before.

In this new exhibition, Breda Lynch presents work that cuts to the heart of how images shape and distort our understanding of identity, sexuality, and belonging. Irreverent and unsettling, Lynch’s practice refuses the comforting notion that society has moved on by holding a mirror up to the present.

My art practice examines the aesthetics of visual images from the public
domain, with a particular interest in the rhetoric of “queer” identities,
practices, and types of social regulation and protest. This interest is rooted in the emergence and evolution of popular culture and the historic assertions of socio-political movements across the circuits of social media, then as now. My practice is at once an archive of the oppositional and conservative, the radical and the phobic, and an opportunity to consider how any public claim achieves performative force through the manipulations of the visual. While I use irony, humour, and a sense of the ridiculous as a means of subversion, I am also interested in collapsing past and present. Here, my appropriations of “found” imagery and collage techniques suggest that many of the problems of the past – around identity, gender, sexuality etc. – haunt our allegedly liberal present. My work aims to be a chilling reminder of how many of us can be persuaded by the pernicious, though ultimately hopes to explode such.

Breda Lynch 2026

Breda Lynch a visual artist living in Limerick City.

An artist who engages with a variety of media that includes drawing, photography, print and digital media, video and installation, they engage with dialogues and discourses on – queer feminisms, Occulture, image appropriation and the culture of the copy. Lynch has exhibited extensively in Ireland and abroad. International exhibitions include curated group exhibitions in Australia, China, Iceland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Thailand, UK, and USA.

Solo exhibitions in Ireland include: If You’re Not Scared The Atomic Bomb Is Not Interesting, Source Arts Centre, Thurles (2024). Blue Dyke Ormston House, Limerick (2020-21), Witch and Lezzie, Ashford Gallery RHA Dublin (2017), Fragments of a Lost Civilisation, Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar (2016), The Pit and Other Stories, at Siamsa Tire Gallery, Tralee (2014),
Thursday’s Clinic, 126 Gallery, Galway (2013), Strangelove, Black Mariah, Triskel, Cork (2010), Song to the Siren, Galway Arts Centre (2009), Place of the Crows and Fleurs Fatales, Context Gallery Derry (2007) and Dark Brides and Silent Twins Limerick City Gallery of Art (2006).

Her work is represented in a number of public and private collections including – The IMMA Collection Dublin, The Arts Council of Ireland, OPW – Office of Public Works, Meta Open Arts Dublin, The Women’s Library Glasgow, NUIG Collection – Galway, Luciano Benetton Italy, Trinity College Art Collection, National Library of Ireland, Library Project Dublin, Limerick City Gallery Collection, University of Limerick Collection, Hunt Museum Limerick.

In 2024 Lynch presented their work Cake Bomb, at the 24th Sydney Biennale Australia, titled Ten Thousand Suns curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Gerrano. This was in partnership with IMMA and Culture Ireland’s INVITE programme. More recently, in April 2026, Lynch presented work in Neither Water Nor Land at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland, curated by Anna Czaban and Krzysztof Gutfrański.