Grant Mooney: sphere music

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.

Exhibition Events 
Chisenhale Gallery works with artists to create a series of events that expand on their exhibitions, inviting experimentation, reflection, and encounter.

Performance
Thursday, 9 October, 7-8pm
Journey through resonant sonic frequencies within bodies, materials and space in a newly commissioned performance by artist and multi-instrumentalist Sarahsson. 

Tour
Saturday, November 1, 11am-12pm
Join an introduction to Mooney’s commission with Olivia Aherne, Curator and Zhejun Gao, Asymmetry Curatorial Research Fellow, accompanied by coffee, tea, and pastries.

Performance
Thursday, November 20, 7-9pm
A newly commissioned durational sound performance by Willow Swan and Ellis Berwick, channeling wind through improvised sculptural formations to produce soundscapes rooted in memory, identity and ritual.  

Screening
Off-site: Close-Up Film Centre
Wednesday, December 3, 6:30-8pm
Exploring meteorological phenomena, sonic resonance, and the hidden forces shaping our perception of landscape and environment, this screening situates Grant Mooney’s practice within a wider lineage of experimental film and sound. It brings together works by Francis Alÿs, Mary Helena Clark, Alvin Lucier, and P. Staff, among others.

All events are free to attend, but booking is essential. Please visit chisenhale.org.uk

We are committed to ensuring our events are accessible for all. Please contact mail@chisenhale.org.uk to discuss any access needs. We will endeavour to meet all requests where possible. Please be advised that requests should be made two weeks in advance of the event.

Biography
Grant Mooney lives and works in New York. Selected exhibitions include: calcis, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Middletown, 2024; reserves, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, 2024; Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024; Radial, Progetto, Puglia, 2023; I heard myself close my eyes, then open them, Braunsfelder, Cologne, 2022; four x four, Lumber Room, Portland, 2022; The Inconstant World, Institute for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2021; Some of the Hole, Simian, Copenhagen, 2020; In Practice: Total Disbelief, Sculpture Center, New York, 2020.

sphere music is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London in partnership with Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach.

Headline Supporters: Henry Moore Foundation, Miguel Abreu Gallery and Toby Dayton.

With additional support from Mario Russo and Jim Abrams and the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Fund. 

With special thanks to our Events Drinks Sponsor: Estrella Damm.

Chisenhale Gallery’s Schools’ Programme 2025 is made possible through the generosity of Freelands Foundation.

The 2025-26 Asymmetry Curatorial Research Fellow is hosted by Chisenhale Gallery.