the limits of my language

Chloe Brenan

Elaine Grainger

Johanna Nulty

[Elaine Grainger’s artwork can be viewed through the windows of 76-77 John Street Lower, Kilkenny, until Sunday 23 May]

the limits of my language is a group exhibition with artists Chloe Brenan, Elaine Grainger and Johanna Nulty. A conversation commences; a dialogue through structure, sound and film in an attempt to articulate tacit knowledge, haptic memory and subconscious experience.

Language spoken or written can be constricting. There are often rules and codes that must be adhered to when expressing oneself and interpreting others. What we cannot talk about, due to the limitations of language, is often passed over in silence. This inability to express the personal, innate and intimate forces us to find an alternative way to communicate what is being left unsaid.

A quote from Claire-Louise Bennett’s book Pond has been a persistent point of inspiration, “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.”

This exhibition of newly commissioned artworks is not open to the public, simply realised and documented, with only Elaine Grainger’s assemblage of objects and elements still lingering in the Kilkenny Arts Office Gallery, 76-77 John Street Lower, until Sunday 23 May.

Elaine Grainger, “In its essence my practice is about recording and revealing what is unseen and unheard. Threads sewn together are born from small observations; things left untouched, the residue of an event and fragments of recollection losing its detail. The work on site in the gallery space was created in direct response to an engagement with a local limestone quarry. Uncovering memory through the rupture in the landscape and recording its active transformation. The works presented in the gallery space have themselves been through transformation​,​ porcelain ground to dust, crab apples fallen and cast forms an altered time frame of transformation. Each assembled piece has the potential to collapse, deflate and disintegrate but never to disappear.”

A souvenir from the exhibition has been collaboratively produced with writer Michaela Nash and designers Models & Constructs to engage with an audience who can not visit the gallery. Please email artsofficekkcoco@gmail.com to receive an exhibition souvenir in the post.

the limits of my language is the third exhibition of the Kilkenny County Council Arts Office’s Emerging Curator in Residence 2020 with Rachel Botha. This programme is funded by Kilkenny County Council Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland.

Chloe Brenan

Chloe Brenan is an artist working across moving image, sound, print, language and photography. The porosity of the body and its indivisibility from its environs is a recurring concern. Works often involve close examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life and processes on the edge of perception that question boundaries between bodies, intimate spaces and the wider environment. She explores the simultaneous engagement of the corporeal and the intellect, and the reciprocity between both, that enhances our ability to be responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings. On one side there is our ability to measure and model, on the other our somatic capacity to tacitly experience, infer and intuit.

She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; Periphery Space, Wexford; Galway Arts Centre; The Library Project, Dublin; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; The Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design, Tallinn; as well as in print at Dublin Art Book Fair 2019; Tokyo Art Book Fair, Japan; and I Never Read Art Book Fair, Basel. She has received support for her practice from the Arts Council of Ireland, Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust, Culture Ireland, the NCAD Research Committee, Carlow County Council and ArtLinks. Her work is included in the collections of 100Archive, Ireland; Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo, Japan; New Zealand Audio Foundation, Zine and Art Book Collection, Auckland, New Zealand; and MoMA Library Artist Publication Collection, New York.

Elaine Grainger

Elaine Grainger is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice is a site-specific study of time on the objects and spaces, gathered and inhabited. Assemblages constructed, adapt and transform their behaviour in different spaces, vulnerable to the spontaneity of becoming or collapsing. The audience is invited to delve into points along this journey of transformation, reflecting on the precarious process whilst simultaneously understanding its loss of control. 

Grainger returned to full time education & completed an MFA in NCAD, Dublin, Ireland, 2018. Shortlisted for the RDS Visual Arts Awards 2018, winner of the RDS Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris Residency Award 2018 & selected for the Royal Hibernian Academy Peer Residency Award 2019. Highly Commended Award, Highlanes Gallery, 2020. Exhibitions: MFA Degree show Barely hardly there, 2018, The possibilities of place, CCI, Paris and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios, 2019, The gap between noise, Complex, 2019. not yet, no, PADA Studios, Lisbon, Portugal, 2020.

Johanna Nulty

Johanna Nulty is a visual artist based in Cavan, Ireland. Nulty has a BA in Fine Art from Institute of Technology Sligo and received her MFA from Ulster University. Nulty’s work is predominantly object based, exploring sound from mass produced materials and found objects. Her practice explores the possibilities of the subconscious movement of everyday material and often results in an amalgamation of audio videos and sound pieces.

Nulty had her first solo exhibition A Portrait of this Region in Townhall Gallery, Cavan, 2017 and recently FRACAS, Flax Art Studios, Havelock House, Belfast, 2020. Other notable exhibitions include Audioblast Festival #8, Apo33, France, Photophobia Contemporary Moving Image Festival, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada, Flax Art Studios 30th Anniversary, Flax Art Studios, Havelock House, Belfast, Catalyst Audio Tracks 002, Resonance and Catalyst Audio Tracks 003, Our Listening Baths