1. mother’s tankstation dublin (autumn 2024)

It’s Autumn. Leaves on the ground herald new colours, new colds, new harbingers. Last night, while the wind began its first strip-search of the year, I received an email notifying me of the next exhibition at Mother's Tankstation Limited London. It opens in October. I linked to the gallery's website, clicked on the exhibition dropdown, and pressed "Dublin." There it was—a new exhibition opening this week at the Dublin branch of the gallery. It’s been four and a half months since the last exhibition opened in April.

I miss what Mother's Tankstation Dublin was, an artist-run for-profit that produced successive exhibitions, sometimes four, five, even six exhibitions a year. It’s weird how real life has got slower and more acned versus the botoxed accelerationism of online. IMother’s is the only commercial concept gallery in Dublin. The exhibitions always have the mark of an artist's eye orchestrating them, rather than a dealer’s eye with fantasy collectors swarming dilated irises green.

It's difficult to describe what artists David Godbold and Finola Jones do in terms of representing and curating the artists they've exhibited over the past 20 years at Mother’s Tankstation, but they certainly do something different. They have created a good cover story, involving making the commercial gallery space a family, a home. 

Originally a sausage factory where workers stuffed sausage in a concrete and galvanised catedral of Guinness hops and extraneous meat smells, Mother's is a series of gable ends flipped inwards, resulting in a snow slope of slanted light and aspect, footed by gallery furniture, including wood panelling, a stove and sometimes a modestly sized and priced parked car. There’s glimpses of the private space beyond the gallery, where the artists sometimes live, sleep and host gallery dinners with their stable of artists.

The ritual of getting access to the gallery involves (in my case) an appointment, ringing the doorbell, patiently waiting in the waft of hops and Liffey, negotiating a waste-high metal gate to then cross the gallery threshold into an antechamber where a stairs carves the darkness above and a lone artwork meets your eyes before the exhibition entree.  

On entering I always feel eyes on me other than mine: narcissist or paranoid? you decide. The unseen is enigmatic and erotic, especially when it is imagined looking. I always feel I have entered a home—sometimes welcome, sometimes unwelcome, which is all part of the enigma of Mother’s. The exhibitions themselves have a quirkiness to them, down to the press releases, which have become more personalised and confessional in recent years, flirting between academic and interrogation-room confessional. 

Mother’s always upps the conceptual stakes in their exhibition installations. If the art isn’t explicitly experiential, you still come away with an experience. The gallery split its devotion between Dublin and London in 2017, which meant fewer and longer duration exhibitions programmed in Dublin. This was soon followed by the end of public art openings at the gallery. Perhaps motivated by a lacklustre attendance. 

The gallery itself has an anti-social reputation, but whether that's due to envy or something more empirical, I don't know. We’ve all heard the stories, if we haven’t been witnesses or protagonists in the rumour mill. What I do know is that all those anti-social tensions and anxieties have added to the enigma and personification of the gallery. In the early years, one of the gallery's manifestos made it explicit that “Mother” wasn’t meant to infer a nurturing or matriarial relationship with its artists. That said, the gallery has always felt familial, like a family coming together at Christmas with the plus-one tensions that ensue when gifts and family, art and people are in close proximity.

Mother's is a womb in waiting; you just have to get through the therapy to access its warmth. Over the years the gallery and its artists have given me good words, words that speak to the significant relationship between artworks, their settings and the unseen actors that orchestrate both. Even the gossip surrounding the gallery contributes to its enigma. 

September is usually prime time in the art calendar after the drought of Summer. With TBG&S temporarily on hiatus on the Dublin port, and the Project Arts Centre less what it once was in terms of visual art, the frantic indecision that overcame me when trying to choose a gallery to visit on the weekly commute back home is less, much less these days. Autumn is definitely here in more ways than one.