Leave them where they lay. Found in an uncanny corner of the QR generated gallery map for Áine McBride’s solo exhibition point of fold at Mother’s Tankstation, is “notes: titles for works, in no particular order”. Included in the list is “friends, lovers, allies”, but no enemies. A world without enmity? Is that good? Bad? Flat! On closer inspection “friends, lovers, allies” is preceded by “gauge” which, when collapsed with the aforementioned, reads as the measuring of friends, lovers, allies. I like that. There’s hierarchy implied; judgment too. Especially when you consider architecture vis-a-vis society as something that goes up/down, not just flatly across. There can be no rupture or change in society if the fabric of the world is flat. Democracy is the fight for not the realisation of. Then there’s “the in-and-of itself” on the list, which is missing ‘thing’ in Schopenhauer’s terminology – the thing in-and-of-itself. I wonder what world Áine inhabits in her work: the phenomenal world of objects as perceived through the human; or the noumenal world where the essence of things outside of human perception (time, space & causality) exist in and of themselves, & where impossible questions can be paradoxically answered minus the kink of the human to see or hear the answers. Perhaps, as also listed in her notes on the “power stance” —‘tilted head, relaxed posture’— there is an implication of being “both ‘n all” in her work? If Áine’s work exists in the noumenal world, or the in-and-of-itself, then there is nothing left to say, as any word mentioned in the vicinity of her objects would miss the point. I firmly believe art is concerned with sociability, & that Áine McBride’s sculptural articulations in space elegantly invite the awkward human to physically stoop, intellectually stumble, imagine & feel the knuckle of steel that dead-arms that bruised pinstripe blazer pinioned to the gallery wall. Power punching without the rhetoric! These objects are something to embody & empower a way of thinking & moving in/out & between the world of things & subjects. Especially when confined to the footprint of a gallery signposted with Private spaces that sidewind consciously out of view.

—James Merrigan

Through 4 December 2021.