GLASGOW.- For her second solo exhibition, emerging artist Tessa Lynch brings together new and repositioned artworks. An artist known for her material allusiveness, here Lynch critically reflect on urban life, crafting scenarios that are both humorous and unsettling.

Tessa Lynch’s artworks have a particular graphic quality. They are direct and deadpan; materially precise (a riff on macho minimalism, perhaps) 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. Bubbling with a sense of humour, Lynch’s artworks re-chart the emotional impact of the structures we are surrounded by, prompting the question who designs are these for?

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 Wipe Clean: The Scots Magazine (2023) was originally made as part of her collaboration with Rachel Adams (Gabe Care) for the Travelling Gallery’s exhibition ‘High on the Summit Ridge’.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 ads abstracted from The Scots magazine (‘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. In this way, the work haunts industrial redevelopment, revealing the ideology that underscores much urban regeneration.

Lynch’s new series of chalk drawings Play Panels (2025) each depicts a balloon-like figure 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 fragile nature of these drawings instanciates a feeling of dispair Lynch associates with the current political condition — a state of affairs where those in positions of power make play things of us.

The sculptural work Through (2025) has emerged from Lynch’s ongoing dialogue with artist-researcher Jenny Richards. It resonates with the concept of the flâneuse, described by Lauren Elkin as “a determined, resourceful woman keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” 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 and how parenting has reshaped their creative practices, highlighting that much of the work involved in parenthood is both highly creative and largely unnoticed.Throughs translates snippets of these conversations into visual forms, positioning them upon a curved structure which resembles the advertisement boards found in subway stations. In this way, Throughs presents us with visual whispers of a feminist critique, suggesting that liberation can be discovered through a thoughtful re-examination of the everyday systems that surround us.