Nathan Lynch

Instagram: nathanlynchart

Website: https://www.nathanlynch.com/

Bio: Nathan Lynch (Pasco, WA) grew up in an agricultural community in the high desert of Columbia River Basin. Lynch’s recent exhibitions include More Than What My Hands Can Hold at Gallery 16 and Same Blue as the Sky with Studio Ahead. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society for seabird nest designs on Año Nuevo Island, Farallon Islands and Channel Islands. Lynch, a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, studied with Ken Price at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at California College of the Arts.

Statement: His concerns for political conflict and environmental upheaval are filtered through notions of absurdity, hand fabrication and the dramatic devices of storytelling. As a sculptor and performance artist Lynch has made collaboration and experimentation major components of his practice. Lynch’s sculptures draw inspiration from political theatrics and the fragility of power, exploring recurring human patterns of ambition, vulnerability, and folly. His abstract forms mimic the personas, positions, and posturing of public figures—appearing inflated, yet sagging under an implied weight, as if buckling under pressure. Lynch is particularly interested in the formal beauty of these objects and their ability to encapsulate, in abstract terms, the tension between human ambition and inevitable disappointment. In his recent work, he shifts his color palette from visceral pinks and creams to darker, opaque blues—reflecting layers of private and public experience, and signaling a movement between vulnerability, access, and protection. Lynch explores current political and cultural landscapes through the lens of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the boundaries between reality and its representation are blurred. His sculptures engage with ongoing discourse about truth and its manipulation in contemporary American politics, responding to the growing skepticism about what is real and what is constructed. Lynch’s recent exhibitions include More Than What My Hands Can Hold at Gallery 16 and Same Blue as the Sky with Studio Ahead. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wildlife Conservation Society for seabird nest designs on Año Nuevo Island, Farallon Islands and Channel Islands. Lynch, a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, studied with Ken Price at the University of Southern California and earned an MFA at Mills College with Ron Nagle. Lynch is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at California College of the Arts.