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
