Artists

Thomas Pellerey Grogan

Press release

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
― René Daumal

While Daumal’s summit marks the tip of the mountain, Thomas P. Grogan invites us to reflect differently on hierarchies of verticality. The trajectory of the artist’s life — ranging from leaves rustling in the crystal-clear air of Savoy to the sun reflecting on London’s tall skyscrapers veiled by a thick urban haze. — is translated here into a multi-sensorial installation. Through changing light, sound, and air speed, the exhibition suggests that landscapes are woven into life, and lives are woven into landscapes — in a process that is continuous and never-ending.

Its title, Roof of the Winds, comes from Paul Éluard’s poem La Parole, from which two more lines seem particularly relevant: “I am diseased flowers and stones [...] And the shadow that flows from the deep windows”. The slowly turning ceiling sculpture produces faint, shifting variations of brightness throughout the space, playing with the depth of other elements in the room and transforming them from flat to profound. The powerful industrial light — the sun of factory workers — is here softened by a white grid salvaged from scaffolding hoardings. These modular units that ornament the city — façades hiding processes of renovation, improvement, and progress — echo a vocabulary of struggle, of humanity’s ongoing fight against time.

It seems that Thomas P. Grogan seeks to undo the traditional romantic dichotomy between the gloomy city and emancipating nature. His wall-mounted sound sculptures blur the clarity of distinct rural sounds and the compressed density of urban noise. The polyphonic topography diffused here — where volumes rise and fall with patterns of illumination — turns the lo-fi hum of the city into a hi-fi-inspired auditory “valley” within London’s entangled soundscape. This valley is not only peaceful and soothing; it also resonates with the uncanny valley — that unsettling space between familiarity and strangeness.And finally, the air. Three fans of different sizes, each tuned to a separate frequency band — high, mid, and low — transform sound into motion. Once again, Thomas P. Grogan builds a mille-feuille system, drawing, implicitly, a return to the source of things, while traveling in multiple directions.