Moving Through Things
Installation extending the main exhibition
Performance — Saturday 15th and 22nd November, 1pm. Starting at STAC gallery. No booking required.
Moving Through Things, a new exhibition and performance by Elaine Grainger traces sequences of movement across three interwoven sites: Slievenamon mountain, STAC Gallery, and STAC Chapel. Drawing on the mountain’s historic cursus — a pathway once used for procession and ritual — the work explores how motion accumulates meaning, absorbs time, and dissolves boundaries between self, place, and ritual. It considers movement not as transit, but as a sustained form of attention.
The mountain forms the origin point of the project, a site of exploration and encounter where walking becomes a way of listening, absorbing, and exchanging with the land. The body’s repetitive gestures gather a rhythm that holds both time and transformation.
In the gallery, this rhythm is translated into a sculptural and sensory environment. Circular forms and transparent materials create a spatial choreography that shifts gently with light and presence. Sound, scent, and subtle movement invite the viewer into a state of quiet attunement, where perception unfolds slowly. The circle acts as both structure and cycle—a returning motion that mirrors walking, breath, and the passage of time. The installation is not fixed but open, allowing the works to evolve within the space and through the viewer’s movement and time.
The installation at STAC Chapel extends this experience into activation. Here, the artist leads the audience through a silent performance guided by a series of non-verbal instructions. Movements of lifting, holding, and releasing—become a shared rhythm of care and offering. Through gesture, breath, and stillness, the audience and artist together activate the space, creating a collective moment of attention and reciprocity.
Moving Through Things weaves walking, repetition, and transformation into a continuous motion that connects landscape, gallery, and body. It is an invitation to slow down, to move with awareness, and to offer presence as an act of exchange between self and place.
Elaine Grainger is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice incorporates sculptural interventions, performance, drawing, moving-image and sound. She holds an MFA from NCAD, Dublin (2018). Elaine was shortlisted for RDS Visual Arts Awards (2018) and was winner of RDS Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Award (2018). Other awards include; Royal Hibernian Academy, Peer Residency Award, Dublin, Ireland (2019) and the Casa Wabi x Art Forum International Residency Award Mexico (2025). Selected Exhibitions; Echo Mapping, PINK, Manchester (2025); Holding on Lightly, The LAB Gallery, Dublin (2023); You observe, I observed, Juxtapose, Aarhus, Denmark (2023); Undone, Körpasstradir Gallery, Reykjavik (2022); Visible Island, Dublin (2021); The possibilities of place, CCI, Paris + TBG&S, Dublin (2019); The gap between noise, The Complex, Dublin (2019).
