Limerick City Gallery of Art is delighted to present ‘Quantum Listening’ by Trudi van der Elsen, a contemporary multi-media artist, originally from the Netherlands and now based in the West of Ireland.
‘Quantum Listening' the title given to a body of work that explores the relationship between the human body and the wider world, and the invisible frequencies that connect them. Working across painting, photography, video and performance, the artist weaves together forms of matter, agency, subjectivity and objectivity.
25th June - 30th August 2026
Limerick City Gallery of Art
‘Quantum Listening' the title given to a body of work by Trudi van der Elsen that explores the relationship between the human body and the wider world, and the invisible frequencies that connect them. Working across painting, photography, video and performance, the artist weaves together forms of matter, agency, subjectivity and objectivity.
Quantum listening describes a conceptual and methodological thread running through the work; listening is not only an act of hearing, but a full-bodied attunement to the world around us. It is a process by which the world enters into the human body through vibration; that same body in turn releases its own vibrations into the world. As the quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad argues, entities do not pre-exist as independent forms but emerge through their entangled relations. Her concept of 'intra-action' emphasises existence as a relational process, exposing the boundary between self and world as infra-thin, if not an illusion entirely.
The artist situates her practice in that fluid space between self and world, articulating a mode of 'symbiotic being', alive to visible and invisible elements. The resulting works manifest the experience of a more-than-human world to which the artist 'listens' in manifold ways, conjuring a vibrant, interconnected multiverse. Paying close attention and attuning all of her senses to her immediate and extended environment is how this artist navigates her existence in a sensuous, material world, teeming with presences, energies and connected forms.
Whether in her performance work or in her paintings, the artist uses her body as an instrument - sometimes visually present, sometimes evident in the material traces of her embodied movements in space. The artist considers the body not just as existing in space but as continuous with space itself, and so the work draws on multiple spatial registers: hyperspace and the digital web, natural space and bodily space, the atmospheric and the cosmic.
In the photographic and video works we see the artist immersed bodily in specific places: the boglands of Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark; the mudflats of the Shannon Estuary; the Ringfort of Cahercon and, by extension, the Aughinish Alumina plant across the river. In each case, the work exceeds the image; it is a performative intra-action with the site, a concentration of presence and attention that elicits its vibrations, entanglements, cultural resonances and political tensions. The images offer poetic entry points into those charged encounters.
The paintings act as mirror-reflections of the universe and energies that the artist perceives all around her, from the cosmic to the cellular. In an ever-accelerating experience of hyper-linked reality, van der Elsen values the quality of stillness and temporal elasticity unique to painting. We sense a constant shifting of perspectives between micro- and macro-dimensions, as she folds a world of feeling and ideas into the materiality of paint. Strata of marks form a conversation between lines and openings, between interior and exterior worlds, between what is known and what lies beyond recognition.
The work presented in Quantum Listening is an invitation to the viewer to attune with their whole body to the frequencies that connect us all.
Instagram: @trudivanderelsen
