Sean Lynch

Searching for Delorean

By María Mínguez

Have you ever thought of what happens to a car factory when it is closed? Where does the material end up? What happens with its building and surroundings? What provoked the factory’s bankruptcy?

The first solo exhibition of the Irish artist Sean Lynch (b.1978) at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery is the result of research done on the bankruptcy and subsequent aftermath of the DeLorean car factory, which operated outside Belfast, throughout 1981-82. He took a particular interest “in understanding how the actual production of the car wound down.”

A series of photographs displayed in the shiny gallery trace a path taken by the artist throughout 2009 to seek out and find the location of the tooling once used to make the body of the car. These images detail the current condition of factories once involved in the production and assembly of the car in Carlow and Belfast, sites of scrap yards that collected and handled the leftover material, and the boat and fish farm that transported and adopted the remaining metal tooling into anchors at the bottom of the sea.

Sean Lynch, DeLorean: Progress Report IV, 2009 – 2010, c-print (ed. of 3), 40” x 52”. Courtesy of the artist and Kevin Kavanagh Gallery

Following the series, three pictures prove that Lynch finally located the remains at the bottom of Galway Bay where industrial deep sea divers took some shots of crabs and lobsters that now live in the coral around the nooks and shapes that once pressed out stainless steel panels of the car’s exterior.

In the middle of the showroom, an installation of wood and steel prove Lynch´s intention of producing sections of DeLorean by hand rather than industrial means. In the artists own words: “I had the dream of making the car work and ride around Dublin.”

The exhibition seems to be a story of death and birth. Photographs are windows to a cemetery, an abandoned factory, where a mountain of steel skeletons, machinery and underground water-tombs are shown. The installation is like a reinterpretation and rebirth of the DeLorean cars, giving them a new sense and a motive to be remembered.

What Sean Lynch wants viewers to see in his artworks is often not identifiable. Text has a crucial role since it decodes his pieces and highlights their meaning. Editor and publisher of several books and pamphlets focused on Irish art and architecture, he investigates many different almost-forgotten historical subjects. Using his practice as a platform against the cultural amnesia that surrounds a wide variety of topics, Lynch’s works revives stories and gives existence to objects. His exhibitions are an attraction for those who love artists such as Allan Sekula and miss historical and journalistic background on art pieces.

(January 7 - 29, 2010)

María Mínguez is an art critic based in Dublin, Ireland.