GLASGOW.- Tessa Lynch's solo exhibition, Arena, features both new and repositioned artworks. An artist known for her material allusiveness, here Lynch critically reflects on the control of urban life, crafting scenarios that are both humorous and unsettling.

Tessa Lynch’s artworks have a graphic quality. They are direct and deadpan; materially precise and subtlety expressive. From site-specific sculpture through to performance, print and more, Lynch favours a way of making where ideas guide form. It's a discursive process, a conversation or collaboration not only with the world built all around us, thinking how this can be refracted, but with the bodies that share this space. In this way, Lynch’s artworks re-chart the emotional impact of the structures we are surrounded by, prompting us to question who controls the city space and how this coercion manifests in the urban realm.

In her second solo exhibition with Patricia Fleming Gallery, Lynch presents three bodies of work. Wipe Clean: The Scots Magazine (2023) was originally made as part of her collaboration with Rachel Adams (Gabe Care) for the Travelling Gallery’s exhibition High on the Summit Ridge.

Constructed from five mirror panels, each adorned with cloth mark smears and graphics abstracted from The Scots magazine adverts (‘a glossy monthly magazine that brings Scotland to life in all its glory’), the work recalls the process of obscuring shop windows through the application of white paint. Read critically, this visual effect haunts stages of urban regeneration, revealing the ideology that underscores much civic development. Aligning with Lynch’s feminist approch, it feels of note that these panels are being re-presented in Glasgow, the first city in the UK to adopt a feminist planning policy thanks to the work done by Councillor Holly Bruce.

Lynch’s new series of chalk drawings Play Panels (2025) each depicts a balloon-like character squashed within the confines of a black box. Smiling with a child-like naivety, these creatures recall the overscaled marionettes that accompany crowd pleasing parades. Far from being wistful or toothless, the impending pop of these figures jests towards a more contoured meaning; at what age are we roped into spectacular market systems that fill civic spaces with generic forms of hot air.

The sculptural artworks Through (2025) have emerged from Lynch’s ongoing dialogue with artist-researcher Jenny Richards. Conceptually, they resonate with Lauren Elkin conception of the flâneuse: “a determined, resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city”. Since 2014, Lynch and Richards have explored various cities on foot, often discussing themes such as the deindustrialization of urban spaces and the alternative forms of labor that have emerged in response. They also examine the experience of navigating the city with young children, highlighting that much of the work involved in parenthood is both highly creative and largely unnoticed. Through translates these conversations into visual form. A series of fabric hangings, the works appear as disheveled fly posters, snippets of a previous life just about visible. In this way, Through presents us with visual whispers of a flâneuse critique, suggesting how, through a thoughtful re-examination of everyday life, we can generate alternative civic practices.