Christine Corday: Balens
A new sculptural series in variable scale

Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to present BALENS, a new body of work by Christine Corday. Rooted in her sustained inquiry into elemental forces, BALENS introduces a sculptural language grounded not in representation, but in experience—an encounter with form, weight, and motion that invites a deepening of our physical and sensory awareness. At once sculpture and function, each work in the series takes the shape of a rocking floor chaise. Moving with the body while holding its stillness, BALENS traverses scale, from intimate handheld objects to civic-scale installations, yet always retains an essential proposition: to experience the material world as a place of contact and continuity.

Corday’s work emerges from a transdisciplinary practice shaped by collaborations with astrophysicists, chemists, and engineers, including research partners at institutions such as NASA/SETI and ITER, the world’s largest nuclear experimental fusion project. From her early internship studying large structure cosmology to her hand-applied patination of the National September 11 Memorial, Corday has focused on what she describes as a “single practice of all fields”—a conceptual and physical engagement with the atomic medium as a shared vocabulary across disciplines. For Corday, pressure, temperature, and time are not conditions but materials. Each work is a record of elemental history, and each surface is a site for sensing those histories through the skin.

Constructed from waxed carbon steel, ceramic coated weathering steel, brushed aluminum, and patinated bronze, the BALENS forms are curated in response to their surroundings, with recycled ocean plastic versions also in development. These materials are chosen not for ornamentation, but for their capacity to hold memory, and to register time through erosion, mass, and contact. The works appear singly, in mirrored pairs, or choreographed groupings, each creating a different mode of orientation between the self and its environment. BALENS occupies its site with clarity and adaptability. It moves fluidly between public and private space while maintaining a sculptural autonomy that refuses spectacle in favor of presence.

Throughout the series, Corday poses a quiet but resonant question: What does it mean to be in contact with matter? To sit still within form? To be moved by the weight of time, by the conditions we carry, and by the unseen forces that structure our perception? In BALENS, we are reminded that we, too, are material, animated matter in constant exchange with the world around us. The work does not illustrate this, it lets us feel it.