Occupying intermediary positions between abstract, autonomous, and site-specific sculpture, the work of New York-based artist Grant Mooney is acutely concerned with tactility and connectivity, while straddling associations of studio craft, material histories, and site-responsive gesture.

For his first exhibition in a UK institution and major new commission, Mooney has developed a new body of work that embraces a series of fluxes and flows: atmospheric, bodily, and material. Drawing on theoretical comparisons of the body’s nervous system to vibratory networks, this exhibition explores the building and its flows as having the potential to generate volatile atmospheres of action, exchange, dependency, and feeling. The commission takes imperceptible currents – cellular and planetary – and makes them tangible through form.

Installed across the building, interconnected and conductive artworks propose living, vibrating systems that span biological, geological, and industrial registers. Large metal forms designed to move volumes of air at low speeds suggest both potential energy and suspended motion, reflecting the artist’s interest in states of latency and indeterminacy. Fan motors have been returned to their pre-factory state. Stripped of paint, surface marks, and signs of manufacture, their contours are reduced to raw material and geometry, offering a sculptural language of rotation and vibration.

Mounted on the gallery’s roof, a large aluminium harp is activated solely by the wind. Rather than amplifying this sound directly, Mooney has translated these vibrations into a visual spectrogram displayed in the gallery. Sound appears as optical reverberation; atmospheric conditions flickering at the edge of perception as live, moving patterns. All 126 glass panes have been removed from the gallery’s window frames, creating a subtle yet deliberate intervention that allows air to flow freely through the space.

Spanning multiple scales and sculptural registers, Mooney’s new commission explores how objects, spaces, and bodies exist in continuous negotiation with their surroundings. Exploring the conditions of responsiveness and dependency, sphere music is a study in how material structures can register, transmit, and quietly reflect the invisible forces that move through and around them.

Grant Mooney’s exhibition continues Chisenhale Gallery’s Commissions Programme for 2025, which includes exhibitions by Claudia Pagès Rabal and Dan Guthrie. All working in response to site, these artists exercise a sensitivity toward social, political, and material histories that shape our relation to the world.

Text: Chisenhale Gallery