pATRICK LYSAGHT
Patrick Lysaght is a multidisciplinary artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose practice spans photography, digital media, kinetic sculpture, immersive installation, and computational art. Drawing on a lifetime of experiences shaped by the landscapes of New Mexico and New York, as well as extensive travel throughout the United States and abroad, his work explores the evolving relationship between technology, perception, memory, and the natural world.
Educated as an electrical engineer, Lysaght was awarded a scholarship from the University of New Mexico and Los Alamos National Laboratory, earning a BSEE in 1989. Soon after, he joined a Neutron Scattering Materials Research Group composed of scientists from industry and academia around the globe. He taught physics at the University of New Mexico Los Alamos and acoustics at the College of Santa Fe while serving on funding panels for the New Mexico Arts Division in the Music, Interdisciplinary Projects, and Artist-In-Residence categories. He later joined Sematech in Austin, Texas, where he worked for eighteen years in the global semiconductor industry and published 3 textbook chapters on accelerator-based atomic structure measurements of nanoelectronic materials.
Having later transitioned to a full-time career in the arts, Lysaght’s artistic practice is rooted in an ongoing investigation of impermanence, entropy, and the increasingly complex dialogue between human systems and ecological realities. His images and installations often juxtapose moments of natural beauty with evidence of environmental transformation, inviting reflection on accountability, resilience, and the interconnectedness of human and natural histories. While his work engages contemporary concerns about climate and sustainability, it remains grounded in a broader philosophical inquiry into change, uncertainty, and adaptation.
With a professional background in semiconductor engineering and advanced digital systems, Lysaght occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of art and technology. He integrates artificial intelligence, generative processes, computational imaging, and custom-built software into his creative practice, treating emerging technologies not as ends in themselves but as tools for extending visual language and expanding the possibilities of artistic expression. His recent work explores collaborative relationships between artist and machine, investigating how algorithmic systems can serve as creative partners in producing images, narratives, and immersive environments.
Contemplating time, Lysaght is interested in transitions, how structure forms as things change, particularly at the interface between fluids of different densities, such as air, water, and sand. Entropy is a measure of randomness and disorder. Although we live in a world where everything ages, deteriorates, and breaks down, Lysaght’s photographs capture the beauty of self-assembly, such as when water molecules condense into precise fractal branches of frost on a cold windshield. Tiny branches form on larger ones, which in turn form on even larger ones, and so on. Each bit is a microcosm of the whole.
Lysaght’s latest quest involves using leading-edge tools and algorithms to create digital compositions in Photoshop, combined with Midjourney. A text prompt directs a Midjourney algorithm to render an image strongly influenced by mood boards composed of his photos and paintings. His imagery is rooted in history while digital tools expand newly realized environments. He builds unique characters, visuals and sound into a surreal world with odd musical components. He vividly expands traditional artmaking into a new visual language.
His 50-minute film, Fleeting Structure, based on his self-published book, Morphology of Fleeting Structure, has received international acclaim. The film, with an original score composed by Lysaght, offers a beautiful and fascinating look at the hidden structures of fluid flow and crystal growth, visible in plain sight across both the living and nonliving worlds. It is also a call for climate action and truth, now.
The Circle Foundation for the Arts has described Lysaght as an artist who exemplifies “current trends and original practices that tell the story of what visual art looks like today.”
In 2016, Lysaght founded Entropy Studio, LLC, a laboratory for creating large-scale mechanical models of chaotic systems and interactive installations. In 2019, he opened Entropy Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a contemporary art space dedicated to experimental and technology-driven artistic practices. Through exhibitions, public programming, and interdisciplinary collaborations, these initiatives have fostered dialogue among artists, technologists, musicians, and writers.
Lysaght’s work has been exhibited throughout the American Southwest and internationally, including presentations at Entropy Gallery, the Santa Fe Gallery Association, and the Venice International Art Fair. His projects frequently integrate visual art with sound, performance, poetry, and digital media, creating immersive experiences that evolve through audience engagement and generative systems. Recent bodies of work have explored themes of Surrealism, Western Surrealism, and Quantum Entanglement, reflecting his ongoing interest in the unseen structures that connect perception, consciousness, and the physical world.