Tote bag - Pebbledash Wonderland by Shane Lynam, limited edition.

Photo Museum Ireland is delighted to present the premiere of Shane Lynam's Pebbledash Wonderland (2014 –2024), a photographic account of his adopted home city, Dublin. The exhibition builds on Lynam’s long-term engagement with urban space across Europe, pushing his practice in new subjective and narrative directions. Pebbledash Wonderland is Lynam's third major body of work and follows on from his acclaimed book, Fifty High Seasons, about modernist French resorts, published in 2018, and Contours exhibited in 2013.

Returning to Dublin in 2012, Lynam began an intensive process of mapping his encounters with the streets and buildings that make up the city’s varied architectural environment. Spanning Ireland’s post-crisis years, and extending into the current era of multinational fuelled economic expansion, he captures a time of profound transformation in Dublin as new construction disrupts established neighbourhoods and communities.

However, Pebbledash Wonderland is not a polemic on development. Formed by the repeated, linked actions of walking and photographing, the work is a fundamentally personal, intuitive representation of the city, reflecting Lynam’s dual position as observer and participant. By evoking the intangible sense of being present in the city, he acts as a witness to change, communicated through the multiple textures of place. 

Another, more personal view of the city is provided by This is it, this be all, a companion work to Pebbledash Wonderland, and shown here as a projection installation. Focusing on his immediate surroundings and intimate, domestic scenes, this series finds Lynam at a moment of transition that forced him to look inward. Made during 2020, the work coincided with constraints that blurred the boundary between work made in public and private spaces. 

Pebbledash Wonderland offers a timely reminder that the complex elements of a contemporary city are almost impossible to grasp in their entirety but must be felt, lived, and recorded,  in small, seemingly insignificant moments. Returning over and over to the same sites, Lynam obsessively photographed the city to create a series of subjective, abstracted spaces that sit somewhere between reality and his own experience. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, the exhibition invites the viewer on an imaginary walk through Pebbledash Wonderland.