I Leap A collaborative response between Elaine Grainger and Moa Gustafsson Söndergaard to You observe I observed , Juxtapose Art Fair, Denmark 2023

I Leap 

Written by Moa Gustafsson Söndergaard arranged by Elaine Grainger

I see you from across the room. You are bending your body, falling into a position. Reaching, filling a gap with your fingers. Slowly stretching before the next cue. To begin again is to remove your hand from the wood. Fold your body towards the floor. Placing weight on your back. Feeling the concrete. Resting is a transition between movements. I move towards the edge, a wall. I am creating a route to communicate. You are still in between stages. Your body is glued to the beginning. To the first score. To concrete. I am mapping the alternatives. Letting my hand slowly follow the textures of the wall. I am closing my eyes, trusting my hand to guide me. You are not a passive observer. You pick yourself up, extending your body, reaching your hand towards the sky. Looking up. I am rethinking my position hitting the edge of the architectural outline. What's next? Do I dare move the structure of this space we have created? It is only wood. Looking up also means letting the gaze wander. Your body is open, open to the possibility of it being closed. Your hands are touching the particles of dust that are flying all across the room. You feel completely free as you watch me in slow motion pushing the wooden structure to the ground. Everything that was slow, repetitive, becomes a fast decay as the structure falls to the ground. You are not trying to stop me, somehow you know the rituals that dictate this space. For something to restart again it needs to have a proper ending. An end that is open, open to the possibility of it being closed. To begin again from the exact same viewpoint but with a different outcome. So. I see you from across the room. You are bending your body, falling into a position. I leap. 

I leap, falling into a position. You are bending your body. I see you from across the room. It begins again from the exact same viewpoint, but with a different outcome. There was an end, an end that was open, open to the possibility of it being closed. For something to restart again it needs to have a proper ending. You are not trying to stop me, somehow you know the rituals that dictate this space. A fast decay has happened, a structure has fallen to the ground. A repetitive movement, a loop was broken. You are feeling completely free as you see me moving in slow motion. Your hands are touching the sky, the particles shimmer in the light. An immediate touch. Your body is open, open to the possibility of it being completely closed. What's next? Do I dare to move the structure of this space we created? Looking up also means letting the gaze wander. Looking up. I am rethinking my position leaping off an invisible edge. You pick yourself up, extending your body reaching your hands towards the sky. You're not a passive observer. I am mapping the alternatives. Letting my hand slowly follow the textures of the wall. I am closing my eyes, trusting my hand to guide me. To concrete. You are still in between stages. Your body is glued to the beginning. To the first score. Resting is a transition between movements. Reaching, filling a gap with your fingers. I move towards the edge, a wall. Feeling the concrete. I am creating a road ahead, a way of communicating. To begin again is to remove your hand from the wood. Fold your body towards the floor. Placing weight on your back. I see you from across the room. Slowly stretching before the next cue. 

Pink Palace Text by Laura Ní Fhlaibhín in response to the exhibition HOLDING ON Lightly at The LAB Gallery Dublin

The Pink Palace

The pink palace sways and floats on the corner of Foley Street.  A benevolent palace, not descended from an imperial lineage of fortresses and castles and settlements and cathedrals and towers and arrows and mines and booby traps and walls and surveillance posts and shields and statues and drones, but one of air channels and sun traps and clay pads and dancing womb-linings.

Majestic plastic billowing womb-lining twins that never got sick and tired and inflamed but rather grew more palatial and pink with each solar rotation. The lining twins never tore, the stitching held, the sheets swelled with optimum air quality conditions thanks to kind guardians that hold the door gently. The majestic, airy, smooth towering womb-lining twins, devoid of lesions and cysts, are the ideal thickness grade, measurement and form, dimensions and interiors to appreciate in an ocean of cavities and evacuations and floods. 

The pink palace blueprints were sketched in the hospital site, in a cavity where the MRI machines and the waiting room and the magnet shell enclosure had been before. The hospital-grade, plastic laundry bags had been procured in bulk, after a lengthy tendering process, to ensure infection control and the safe containment and transportation of contaminated laundry in steel trolley cages across the colour-coded hospital corridors and operating theatres and wards to the basement tunnel washers.

In a past grey time, the tunnel washers had been humans, women and girls washing and ironing and stitching laundry from all the hospitals and from all the malevolent palaces and castles and cathedrals and government buildings, their washing and bleaching and stain-removing was involuntary and coercive and cruel and violent in all of the ways we fear.  After a long time the grey slowly faded out of sight to the base layers, and the women and girls who had been imprisoned and enslaved and starved and marked and isolated for their lifetimes were replaced by a long and loud stainless steel machine known as a tunnel washer or a continuous batch washer, that vibrated all along the concrete hospital basement floor.

The hospital-grade plastic laundry bags were procured in bulk because they had been formally tested and approved by many health services and because they dissolved in water and left only harmless trace components with very little environmental impact and because they were puncture resistant. The bags were found under cement and dust and rubble in the cavity where the MRI machine had been, near to the shards from the magnet shell enclosure, and some were pierced somehow in spite of all the tests but some of the other bags buried in the pile were perfect. At first the bags were repurposed as sheets for sleeping and as tourniquets for bleeding and as barriers for resisting infection and later as windows and doors and walls for living after the most recent grey time.

The pinkness of the plastic laundry bags were noticed by a human who was utilising them to resist infection and then with time, to make walls from the wind on the site where the hospital had been before. The human was tickled by the pinkness of them around and in all of the grey everywhere that  continued to drop down from above in powdery clouds and rise up in rubble and catch in her nostrils and all the way down to her lungs. In the time of laundry bags as barriers, this human started to sketch and mark the bags, layering and folding corners and tracing all sorts of things she knew had happened. Then later she ironed them flat through her own choice and decision and through her own hands because there was no electricity to use an iron or to use any of the hospital equipment. She hoisted and wrapped and knotted the edges of the laundry bags to build transparent walls that reminded her of paintings in a cave that she had visited once while on holidays before. 

The pink plastic blueprint barrier walls were wrapped and folded and stored after the grey time dissipated slightly. The same human who was tickled by their pinkness was older now and she was  with other humans who had also utilised the laundry bags as barriers and sheets and tourniquets and windows and walls and doors, on the same hospital site and on and in other cavities all across the city and region. These bags had been folded, hand-ironed and stored as reminders and containers of flashing images that came back often, and so they had never dissolved into sinks and pipes and soil and streams and oceans. These humans who had gathered with their collections of plastic laundry bag-containers of flashing images, decided to build a pink palace together that was not a palace of slit windows to shoot arrows and throw grenades. They stitched the sheets together and they did so with such love that the stitchings have never ripped since and the punctures from the time before, when the radiology suite in the purple section of the hospital was hit with such force to cause the magnet shell enclosure to completely collapse, somehow sealed themselves together again in a miracle, with a substance resembling slug mucus glistening at the puncture wound marks.

So many pink plastic laundry bags had been gathered and stored and held tightly that the humans realised they had stitched enough to create a double-lined pink palace. Once all the edges were hoisted and pinned, as they remembered doing a long time before in the very grey times, the linings started to billow and dance around, an effect they had not anticipated and one that was very different from the taut surfaces they had sculpted back in the past grey time when they were building walls and windows and doors for living again. The double-linings, that they jokingly referred to as the twins,

allowed for hiding spaces and warm channels and they started to play in these passage ways and move the linings slightly this way and that to bring the sun inside.

The sun traps that appeared and disappeared in rhythm with the solar rotations were the ideal dimensions for lying beside and in between the pink, double womb-lining twins, and for suddenly remembering in bright flashes, the long faded marks they had made in a past time on these very sheets in the hospital site cavities and in cavities all across the region, that had reminded them of cave paintings from a now very distant holiday. They all remarked that since it was such an ideal palace to absorb the sun and light and optimum air quality conditions, they would bring their succulents and mosses, and the little clay pads they had squeezed in their hands and attached to metal lengths to hold the vulnerable plants upright, here.

Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, is an artist currently living between London and Wexford. She has been commissioned to write this text in response to an exhibition by Elaine Grainger HOLDING ON Lightly at the The LAB Gallery Dublin, 2023.

undone A Collaborative Project at Körpasstradir Gallery, Reykjavik with Moa Gustafsson Söndergaard

undone 

During a period of five days the artists Elaine Grainger and Moa Gustafsson Söndergaard worked with the gallery space at Körpasstradir in Reykjavik. The space which was an old working barn, became the starting point of the work undone. 

For each day to begin with a sculptural intervention of the architectural features. For each day to choose a different path to follow. 

A project whose core is situated around temporality and how to collectively map and understand it within a space. The artists worked organically alongside each other. Starting off with rearranging and observing the change of work from previous days. Keeping a sense of playfulness yet a sincere approach to the installation, crucially being sensitive to the space not imposing themselves on it. Creating works that correspond with both the space and the artist's own sculptural voice. Using materials that are familiar to the surrounding area, also including selected materials, brought in to interact with the set environment. 

The outcome is a temporary installation where gentle gestures suggest that someone has been there mapping and reflecting upon its existence. 

This collaboration has been initiated during the beginning of an international residency at SIM Reykjavik, Iceland,  March 2022. An immediate connection was made between the artists Elaine Grainger (IE) and Moa Gustafsson Söndergaard (SE) on a personal level and also through informal discussions relating to commonalities in their practices. The artists proposed a collaborative site-specific intervention in the space linked to the residency site. 

The Limits of my Language Text By Michaela Nash

Nothing is ever fully present in signs.
It is an illusion to believe I can ever be fully present to you
in what I say or write, because to use signs at all entails all my meaning being somehow always dispersed, divided and never quite at one with itself.(1)

The word Being cannot be contained by, is always prior to, in fact transcends, signification. Being. Being. Since the word is inadequate it is crossed out, since it is necessary it remains legible, under erasure.
Language is incomplete and unstable.(2)

Not only my meaning. Indeed but I myself: since language is something I am made up of, rather than simply a necessary tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable unified entity must also be a fiction.(1)

I don't think my first language can be written down at all. I'm not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.(3)

I'm not sure it can be made external you see. I don't think my first language can be written down at all. Simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs. I think it has to stay where it is;(3)

It can be made external I'm not sure. In the elastic gloom simmering. My first language can be written down at all I don't think. My flickering organs betwixt, where it is, it has to stay, I think;(3)

It can be made external, in the elastic gloom simmering, first language can be written down. flickering organs betwixt, where it is, it has to stay;(3)

be made external, in the elastic gloom simmer, can be write down. flick organs be to stay;(3)

be made in the can be write down, be to stay;(3)

bi meɪd ɪn ðə kən bi raɪt daʊn, bɪ tə steɪ(3)
bi meɪd bi raɪt daʊn3

bɪ3

In the space,
the air is setting
on your skin, cool
and flushing over your brow
to the bridge of your nose, it rests on your lips, like the disturbance of air after a word spoken

As you move past white walls, over sandstone tiles, the air ripples between you and the artworks,
the contact of your feet, shivers through porcelain dust, scattering molecules into the air as scent;

chalk,

plastic,

fresh wood,

cut stone,

acoustic dusts,
reverberating between white walls
suspended by the dialogue of one video
calling to another on each side of the space,
their voices ripple into the sculptures
which collect every murmur into the quiet weight of their bodies
becoming the pauses between words, the meaning passed over in silence

Air silently percolates through the metal lines and granite syntaxes of the sculptures
drifting between the holes and gaps of language

Of what must be said and
what can be felt but never heard

Air trembling from

disturbed vibrations, condense into a pressure felt

quivering over skin, alerting hairs on the back of necks, to the swelling volume of molecules;
rising into a cloud forming;
over a pale blue sky-

A hand
wading through the
weight of air into motion
beckons the body and air it passes through into speech

Fingers take the shape of the sign between meaning and utterance the rising pitch of the theremin; a mouth opened and speaking

Particles quake,
interference of air builds into,
the theremin’s whine signalling rain
ringing inside of pulse, cymbals shatter over wrists
clouds gather their weight with water, rippling between shoulders,
drums resound into chests, thunder rolls through throats
the flash of high hats, scattering over cheeks, into arching cerebral static words collapse into sensation, clouds condense into rain, falling over your skin as dark marks over dry stone. A sensory data, which dries into the plumes of white lichen on your body. Light from the projector submerges your hands with floating speckles of kin crying warnings through their flesh

Our own bodies no longer awake to the unseasonal heat of air, the strange heights of river water, the prick of a storm arriving on your neck
Or the first burn of a drop falling;

Cognitive dissonance Announced to the body

Your flesh the mediator between fact and stone

C

Porcelain dust,
Settles and falls onto

A translucent barographic line Gathering atmospheric vibrations to tape

Particles no longer suspended Drift onto granite altars

Resting
drawing tenuousness
into prayer murmured beneath breath so that words might fade into silence

Corporeal forms translate to the spaces they inhabit each new site excavating another pause
in their cyclical transformation

Porcelain dust
ground by hands
that molded clay
bound from sediment
communed from a quarry’s arch to the land.

Layers of time unravelled from fragments
magma cooled to granite, bone crushed by centuries into limestone, life fossilized into oil stretched into thin films of plastic
that collect air and porcelain dust
between sunlight

The time buried in their forms panned
into presence to reveal the value of transience
Blossoms are only blossom until they fall to the ground as apples, tentatively red and smooth, defined by what they'll no longer be once changed.
Beside them, their porcelain others, absorb moments noticed before decay. Material creating a point through which to find refuge in the
ultimate impermanence of everything
a space to empty out thoughts
absences filled with the body,

for memories to surface the edge of waiting

E

Silver furrows, crinkling into the ridges of limestone, Crushed, collapsing, compressing into hillsides, Smooth and half-remembered into a home;
Sharp, clean air; suspending the prick of new grass and hawthorn buds, late this year and awakening

the scent of earth and dust, buoyant and floating, into the grind and crush of machinery, blending into a background hum of comfort

Turquoise swelling into green, folding into orange, familiar pinks, warming into the dappled reds of light seen behind closed eyes
glimpses of memories, teased into images pieced together from a feeling

Inked blues pulse into the gold of sunlight over headlands,
the churn and clatter of morning, the land recollecting its shape,

Shapes become forms, edges fold into places, rustles become sounds

Remembered, collecting in the pit of stomachs, churning in guts, welling inside chests, through throats, along vocal chords,
Vibrating with air, swelling through cheeks
Expanding onto the tip of tongues

pressing against teeth

Pushing air
Into
The

Shape

Of

Words

Which fall with the weight Of their failure
To the ground

References;
1 Terry Eagleton, ‘Literary Theory: An Introduction’, 1983

2 Madan Sarup, ‘An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism And Post-Modernism’, 2nd Edition, 1993

3Claire-Louise Bennett, ‘Pond’, 2015

The Limits of my Language Exhibition Curated by Rachel Botha, with Artists Chloe Brenan, Johanna Nulty and Elaine Grainger Kilkenny Arts Office 2021

The gap between noise, 2019 Text by Ingrid Lyons

The Gap Between Noise  An Exhibition by Elaine Grainger

Elaine Grainger facilitates encounters between materials resulting in a series of sculptures in context. They are intuitively made to emphasise attributes of found and gathered objects. 

By maneuvering and responding to the space of The Complex, a former fruit packing facility in Smithfield, she acknowledges its history, celebrating the marks and remnants of its previous uses and intervening briefly before the space morphs and its subtle interior architectures are obliterated permanently. She creates relics through reassertion, bestowing value on objects that might otherwise be cast away. In her renewed attention and appreciation, she celebrates abandoned and neglected facets of the space, transforming it into a shrine for its artifacts. In this way, her inclination towards these objects manifests in their metamorphosing into new objects with a new set of meanings. 

The Gap Between Noisecomprises atmospheric installations that conjure the factory workplace at night, unpeopled and static.The manipulation and arrangement of objects within the space form quiet and unobtrusive meditations - gestures that initiate a conversation between the materials and their environment. Each piece becomes part of a series of minor adjustments to archive the slippage between function and form, between what has defined this space and what will define it in time. Here, Grainger has intervened and paused for a moment, focusing on what exists between the layers of palimpsest, before one layer supersedes another. 

Indeed, layering and shrouding materials are part of the visual trope that recurs throughout these assemblages and allows for myriad iterations of an otherwise familiar object. And as the they are cast into semi-darkness and illuminated from hidden sources, they take on a twilight, ‘witching hour’ feel.

A polystyrene fruit tray has been cast in brittle porcelain and laid out on the rough concrete floor to create a tabular effect, we can observe the grooves and curves that represent the protection of fruit in transit. Therein lies the memory of its previous function, valorised through its reiteration in clay. Minute details of the interior have been coaxed out of hiding and embellished with thread. Patches in the chipped plaster of the wall have been isolated and framed, intimating the appearance of a fresco and allowing us to consider how such indents were left.

Since the nearby Victorian fruit and vegetable market on Mary’s Lane closed in August, it has become apparent that the days of the inner city wholesalers are numbered and that such spaces are dwindling from the city center altogether – soon to be a thing of the past. Liminal zones such as this are worth ruminating over. The marks, stains, knocks, holes and detritus strewn about the place are granted a role to play in the reconstruction of this space as a buffer zone between the old and the new. Between knowledge and anticipation. 

These kinds of spaces rarely get to exist for long - they are themselves, ephemeral. Seldom set aside for use as art spaces, such disused factories, yards and depots tend toward dereliction and eventual demolition. In a city that is changing drastically with little thought for those who populate it, there is less inclination to incorporate existing architectures and more often than not, buildings are leveled to allow for a new purpose built, and therefore homogenous kind of architecture. This in turn obliterates any potential for the social fabric of the city to live on in fragments. Traces of fading narratives are relegated to obscurity before we can assess their significance. 

With plans to join Smithfield and Caple Street, Dublin’s fruit market may soon give way to redevelopment and gentrification. In the interim, the potential for digression is abundant. Much like the abandoned spaces at the edge of the city, there are few expectations for these spaces in their current state and so the capacity for playful digression is heightened. Liverpudlian writer Paul Farley touches on this in many of his works. Taking disused buildings and edgelands as his subject matter, he considers our connection to places and the objects that populate them. 

In his poem Phone Books in which an abandoned space and its moldering contents become the subject of a meditation on the passing of time, he considers the anachronistic potential of a pile of old telephone directories,

You find them in the dark of meter cupboards 

In Kitchen drawers 

Part of the scenery left over from the last lot

Like the sliver of soap on the enamel 

The flowery curtains 

They belong there in the receding spaces

The receding spaces and fading objects Farley visualises belong to a world of ten or twenty years ago, too recent to be valued, culturally or sentimentally and yet they act as mementos of the recent past. In his poems, detritus is ruminated upon in an attempt to grasp how changes in the world around us, render objects once commonplace and abundant, completely obsolete and therefore abandoned, 

Older editions, the ones that wandered up into lofts

Or down to sheds they share with mildew 

And a Lucozade bottle of weed killer 

The codes all changed, the numbers decaying by the minute

Throughout The Gap Between Noise, Grainger takes on the role of cultural archivist. She responds to the history and architecture of the space through her work and in doing so she creates a snapshot of the space in its interim state. After it has been a fruit packing facility, during its time as an art space and before it perhaps becomes an apart-hotel, student accommodation or some other depressing manifestation of the spoils of inner city capitalism. She bestows upon the space, a celebration of its flux. Her acknowledgement of this flux invites us to reflect on the interior architecture of The Complex, how it has been marked from what has gone before and has borne witness to activities that will no longer take place there. 

Guiding us towards previously hidden narratives - whether out of sight, in the periphery of our vision or in plain sight, The Gap Between Noisemeditates on the passing of time and on the untold stories of our city’s history. In this quiet lull we can pause for a moment to ponder the rapid transformation of the area, before the fruit market, and the buildings and objects within are closed off from us again indefinitely or perhaps, permanently. 

- Ingrid Lyons

Ingrid Lyons is a writer, currently living and working in London

Nothing is made, nothing is finished Tara McGinn

NOTHING IS MADE, NOTHING IS FINISHED Tara McGinn

Attempting to write about an artist’s work based on merely a conversation and a list of images, can be a sisyphian headache. It turned out to be a particularly ironic challenge, because the fulcrum of Elaine Grainger’s practice is entirely based on the spaces that both the work and viewer inhabit; spaces I never entered and works I never encountered. In fact, despite the conveniences of viewing past work online, the entire exercise was saved by a phone call. Grainger’s articulation and the fluidity of her language, allowed me to access the work from a different understanding of approaching space.

There might be a negative assumption of absence when confronted with her work, but the tangibility of the incorporeal is the thick conceptual soup that fills it up. Grainger’s MFA degree show “Barely, Hardly There” 2018 in NCAD was fundamentally made around her studio, where the enveloping natural light and encompassing walls were a choreography for her sculptures to be detailed on. The architectural rubric and time spent within her MFA studio became the primary points of reference in the making process. She personified the space’s history through reproductions, collected and created objects that both reflected the surroundings and amplified the manufactured forms. The arrangement of objects consisted of cast surfaces, deconstructed light fixtures, displaced shadows and folds of material. In this case the art school studio is stretched in it’s potential for purpose, either reused or disused, acquiring without any intentional reason. She was then shortlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards and faced with the obstacle of removing the work from its womb, to displaying it in entirely oppositional circumstances. However, this experience she described as “solidifying”; the act of transferring the body of work reinforced its ability to reconfigure and calibrate within a new space, ultimately changing its visual outcomes but retaining the integral meaning. It could be possible to say that about an entire genre of site-specific projects, but when comparing the two different shows, even just through images, this transformation was blatantly obvious. The RDS had artificial lighting and temporary walls for the exhibition, a windowless and lightless paradox for Grainger. Her use of small fluorescents became pivotal to the change, where their glow was “sucked away” before by a bright room, they then became prominent as light sources to redirect the new space. I particularly liked her treatment of two small paintings on layered wooden blocks, lit by stark white projections that transformed them into objects, giving them a weighted density. Against curatorial advice, she opted not to conform to institutional yellow spots that would have kept them, in the traditional understanding, as paintings. The confrontation of an object, a ray of light or soft billowing movement of thin plastic, constitute a practice that embodies deviation, change and adaptability thus overcoming the prescription for consistency and stillness.

I found Graingers ouevre contained an awareness of how the artist themselves must allow for work to constantly modify, and in doing so, the artist must be malleable and reshape accordingly. In this crucial emerging time for Grainger, she allowed her show to have a degree of flexibility that eventually defined her work. The level of scrutiny that a degree show brings can be exacerbated when a national competition suddenly follows suit. These anxiety producing instances, and this is coming from personal experience, could easily cause soon to be graduates to fall back onto what’s considered as acceptable or expected. It could have gone against the grain of making work that couldn’t be easily packaged, moved and replaced onto a plinth. Grainger’s former background of running the Talbot gallery, of which the necessary ingredient is the development and the learning within the process of installation, no doubt influenced her approach and thinking. At times, beyond all abilities, artists placing their work into white cubes isn’t always the autonomous result one hopes for, and contemporary practices continue to outgrow or reject this institutional requirement. The work doesn’t always stop once it is displayed, exhibitions can be an interruption in the middle of a sentence rather than the end of one.

Language that surrounds contemporary art making can easily mute its sensibilities if it’s not present to speak for itself, and attempting to comprehend it through a computer or phone screen turns my reading of it into a dichotomy that is only a half-truth. Toward the end of our chat I felt this limitation present itself in my conscience, and wondered where I could navigate it to. “Nothing is made, nothing is finished...” was said in passing, yet I felt it could become a central, open ended manifesto. The work will continue to mould itself and be moulded by the parameters of wherever it is placed. One may never recognise a distinct repetition in Grainger’s work, nor associate a particular stylisation or medium either. Questioning and probing the identifiable definition of a work, at the same time, unravels it and reveals new knowledge, practices and possibilities.

Tara McGinn writing for Bloomers Magazine, Out of Body Edition

Time is not a line - Pallas Project 2017, Text by Danny Kelly

Words by Danny Kelly response to the exhibition Time is not a line by Elaine Grainger and Michele Hetherington at Pallas Project July 2017

Lines impress simply, conduits read from start to end. Drawn, etched, trailed – they are signs. There isn’t any way to maintain Our lives are not lines. Embracing stillness, cleaving to the anterior, inscribe solicitous postures against the grain. Death is many stories and promotes the donning of tinted lenses, machinic shifts of successive projections. In the lived perspective, theory and creativity remain on the slack chain of infirmity, encamped in the poky and fractious enclosure of the natural. Tracing, advancing, circumscribing, render ornamentations betraying the authorial subject, aroused in surrounding, deleterious progress.

Processual alienation from life appears wedded to the amusements of sensibility. If the course is unbending, it sloughs off topography as providential manna for getting blotto. The unconquerable point of demise is not the origin of all ardency, we discover our values and keep close by them. Articulating the self and sympathy are such practices of making. In Michele Hetherington’s murky, insouciant drawings, introspection – its sparse, gestalt inventories – is raised as a futile projectile at eternity. Each page is a trap of ephemera, bandy concatenations on the untouchable current below that blankly observes its vanishing point. Their material manifestations recognise the subject’s infusion with touching promises of obliteration. 

If eluding the linear is a habitual loop, what is the stake of colour in crowding your arc? A gingham tea pool could warp an afternoon more than the minutes and seconds you forgot your agenda for –

immiscible, immersive, on life’s deserted extension. Elaine Grainger’s forms reflect that fraught extrapolation. Inherently unpacked, in a dialect of structure an essential transition troubles their potency: their want of adhesiveness, permanency, legibility. Each set piece candidly plays out a moment of fight-or-flight, tableaux of hapless acrobatics, of extrication from advancing exposure, reciprocity and transformation. They are brittle, unstable iterations, their heft effervescent with immanent doubt. The incorporation of screens and filtering, reflective motifs, suggests a reactive or adaptive gambit, their tangled, sometimes abrupt relationality evoking the neurotic networking of stuttering monoliths. The greedy consumption of memory is conspicuous, whose candy constructions have supplanted temporal secretion, in a kerfuffle raising a pathos of mistranslation.

The petrified sweep of an aperture, signalling life’s roiling emergencies, disgorges a terrain of stony baubles – all bracketed and spurned by the fleshy extremities of a figure who wavers there, painstakingly, freely, negotiating a course in whose wake the penumbra of the world is pushed back. Finality is recalled as a generative, sheer mid-tone of pleasurably surging negative space. Hetherington’s video installation connects self-identification with apprehension of the other –  the perspectival consternation of connecting. Anticipation of the figure’s external revelation distorts the looped, recurrent schedules of nearness and distance. The dark mouth, stones underfoot, excite the resources of empathy, ignored but given succour somehow, by the hard surface of an unknowable but relatable solitariness. The pliancy of this encounter can seem to assail the proximate figure, its signal of autonomy faltering like a marionette. A claimed kinship is at stake in this absorption, and grows to contested, discomfiting fullness in the space, a human crush. The social enigma shows the philosopher’s cave is less compelling than the locality’s grotto.