Across 2026-27, CJ Mahony will be working on a new body of work exploring experiences of embodiment, visibility and disappearance through the lens of queerness and abstraction.
‘The trouble with time’ (2013), CJ Mahony. Image courtesy of the artist.
CJ’s work utilises abstraction as an expansive space where we can confuse objects and bodies, and encounter ourselves as beings in constant transition. Subtraction is a process for both thinking and making. The resulting works are ambivalent, suggesting both vulnerability and radiance but also refusing to resolve into either.
Working across the multiple sites that Grand Union currently occupies, the project will explore how experiences of dysphoria exist within life transitions, illness, and gender, and how art can offer a counter-narrative to cultural scripts that present ageing as subtraction and loss.
Navigating the complexity of these sites the work will combine spatial interventions with debossed surfaces, dichroic films, and translucent materials, creating an expansive space in which the boundaries between objects and bodies, and between sculptures and people, become blurred.
Drawing on legacies of minimalist practice, CJ uses reflective materials to draw out tensions between visibility and disappearance, and as a way to unsettle the cultural demand to be seen. Ruptured and damaged surfaces queer our experience of seeing ourselves on and in screens. Our access to these objects is always incomplete, yet their proximity, tactility, and intimacy are also invitations for the viewer to engage with their half-hidden suggestions and unfolding possible realities.
This work comes together from several years of conversation between CJ and Co-Programme Directors Jo and Hannah. Meeting at different times, in different contexts, these conversations have developed into distinct dialogues with the intersecting strands of CJ’s practice, all to be expanded as the project continues.
The project also enquires into the softening division between commercial and publicly funded practices, contributing to Grand Union’s exploration of alternative forms of collecting and economic structures.
‘Neither here nor there’ (2025), CJ Mahony. Image courtesy of the artist.
About the Artist
CJ lives and works in Cambridge (UK) and has a studio at Wysing Arts Centre. They studied Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art and completed their MA at Camberwell College of Art in 2012.
CJ has undertaken publicly funded commissions for organisations including Edinburgh Art Festival, Contemporary Art Society, The Tate, National Theatre Scotland, Historic Environments Scotland, ITV, National Trust, The Cambridge Junction and Opera North.
Their work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions internationally and in the UK including: CORPUS, CORPUS, Cambridge (2025); Mumbai Gallery Weekend, India (2023, group); My mind had been everywhere and nowhere, Pavilion Pavilion, Glasgow (2019, solo); The Water Colour Room, HISK, Belgium (2018, group); These restless objects, New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge, Cambridge (2016, solo); Heavy Sentience, Block 336, London (2014, group); situ projects, Cornwall (2010, solo); Aurora Arts Festival, Norwich (2007, solo) and Wysing Arts Centre (2006, solo) amongst others.
CJ works as an independent mentor, and has tutored and lectured widely across the UK for institutions including Glasgow School of Art, Leeds School of Art, Norwich School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, and the University of Cambridge. In 2010 CJ co-founded Aid & Abet, an artist-run project space in Cambridge, which they co-directed until 2014.