Art is how I translate the magic and poetry of the world around me into a form to which people can relate. Every piece I make seeks to honor the mysteries I find every day. Paintings, installations, writing and landscape help me to explore the best way to express the magic of the materials and the surrounding context. Just as important as the finished piece, the process of making objects is personally transformative to me.
Todd Lynch, MLA, MALD
Entropy, the breakdown of systems, amazes and fascinates me. Growing up in places not considered conventionally beautiful, like the South End of Boston before gentrification in the late 70s and Southeast Washington, D.C. in the mid-80s, I learned to value the beauty of people, their dedication to making places their own and the complex allure of places that entropy had claimed. The sometimes harsh, decayed cityscape revealed resilient personalities and poetries of the vacant houses and the new ecologies developing within them, with their sensual variations in texture, color, smell, and form–leaf to brick, tires to grass and glass to spider web. From the time I was a boy, in my desire to understand my surroundings and bridge the gaps between my social context and my environs, I explored vacant houses and lots. I continued that exploration as an art student at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, where I completed a series of art installations in polluted streams, abandoned buildings and green spaces throughout the city, considering place, history and the context of the spaces. In “ecologically devastated” landscapes I see exciting new ecologies developing and I attempt to help those processes along through my art and design.
The constant dynamic of decay and birth underlies all forms of art that I practice. The charged space between creation and destruction catalyzes a part of my creative process to help initiate an exploration. With any of the media I use, the work represents the conversation between moments, materials, context and community. This is how I know that the process has been honest, and that my intention has honored the subject.
Todd Lynch, MLA, MALD