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.