Meet the owner of Cork's newest gallery
Tucked away in a former historic city lane, The Laneway Gallery opened in August but a lot of people don't know of its existence.
At the top of Shandon Street, a new sign has popped up outside the tiny laneway that once housed a chaotic secondhand furniture shop known as Trotter’s.
In the Trotter’s days, windows and doors and windowframes crammed the lane and spilled out onto the street; in 2019, the premises was put up for sale and it sold just before Covid. It’s now been cleared of its clutter and bric-a-brac, and renovated.
The Laneway Gallery opened in August, with minimal fanfare and no press attention for Cork’s newest independent gallery: around 40 people attended the launch for its first ever exhibition, a retrospective of the work of the gallery’s owner, GM Spiers, called Heroes and Villains.
“This all used to be called Twomey’s Cottages,” Geoff Spiers says, showing me around the exhibition space and the studio where he works, next door.
“Look, you can still see the rooms - that was one cottage, and that was another, and that was another.” Sure enough, the ghosts of the walls of what were once tiny cottages are visible on the floor of the 42m² main gallery, which is currently hung with the gallery’s second show, Biology, also Geoff’s work.
A second small gallery, just 2 metres by 6.5 metres, occupies the end of what was once the laneway itself.
Open call for artists
The idea is not that The Laneway be a one-man show indefinitely: Geoff has just launched an open call for artists who would like to exhibit in 2023. The deadline is November 30 and he says he’s had a lot of interest already.
“Originally, I was just going to use it as a studio but it was a bit bigger than I needed,” Geoff says. “I always like seeking out small, interesting galleries when I travel, so I suppose that was in my mind. There’s a lot of art going on in Cork, but not a lot of smaller galleries.”
“For next year, I want to open it up: there has been a fair amount of interest because there are a lot of people out there who want to get their work shown.”
For curated shows arranged through the open call, Geoff is not charging artists a fee but will work on commission from the artworks sold. But artists also have the option to rent the space for a non-curated show in week-long slots throughout the year.
“I want to be able to cover my costs,” he says. “But I’m not interested in making a huge business out of it.”
Geoff, who lives in Cobh, is a self-taught painter who has combined a variety of day-jobs with painting since the late seventies, when he lived and studied in London. He moved to Cork 22 years ago, after an eight-year stint in Glasgow, where he worked for Polaroid.
“Polaroid had a big factory in Scotland, outside Glasgow. I worked there for eight years, in purchasing. I left just before they went bust. When I was there, their big market was Russia, which had just opened up. Because off the KGB and everything, people liked the idea of instant photographs where you didn’t have to hand over a negative to be developed. There was a huge market that kind of lasted about three years and then it died again.”
“I’ve been painting for the last 40 years but not professionally: I couldn’t make any money from it, so I’ve always had nine to five jobs, or seven to eleven jobs or whatever was going,” he says.
Discovering Bacon
Both of the exhibitions Geoff has put on so far span almost the entirety of his painting career.
“I was around in the punk era in London in the mid-seventies and witnessed the whole punk explosion,” he says. “I was lucky. We’d be going to see bands three times a week and some of my friends were in bands. That’s when I started painting. My dad had always painted and he was interested in abstract landscapes and the St Ives School and stuff like that, so there was always art around us, but my friends were all joining bands and I thought I’d give that a go but I wasn’t much good, so I decided I’d do some art around punk.”
“I was really trying to paint what was going on from a punk perspective, but it wasn’t great. And then I discovered Francis Bacon, and that was my big lightbulb moment. I was in the middle of painting a picture of The Specials in the car in Ghost Town and I went to the Tate and they had hung a new Triptych by Bacon and that was it. I went home and turned it into a kind of German expressionist thing,” he says with a laugh.
He has just finished hanging a second collection of his work, Biology, influenced by his interest in medical imagery; he studied physiology at Queen Mary College in London in the 1970s, and also worked for a company making slides. Several of the acrylic paintings in Biology feature what look like Petri dishes, with Pangaea-like abstract continents growing on their surface.
“They’re sort of like worlds, aren’t they?” he says, looking at the paintings. “The external world and the internal world can be similar, full of similar patterns and systems.”
Although self-taught, Geoff doesn’t consider himself an outsider artist. “I’m self-taught, but Bacon was self-taught too,” he says. “My son went to Glasgow School of Art and basically, you don’t do any art any more. You don’t learn to draw: it’s all conceptual.”
For many years, life got in the way of art: in his time in Cork, he has only had a couple of shows, one in the former Fás Office on Sullivan’s Quay when it was home to Sample Studios and another exhibition of digital photography from his time in Addis Ababa: as well as having two adult children in their thirties, Geoff is dad to a 14-year-old girl adopted from the Ethiopian capital and he held an exhibition to raise funds for the orphanage from where she was adopted.
Now retired from his work in the Software industry, he can paint full-time for the first time in many years.
Shandon and art
The Laneway Gallery’s tucked-away location at the top of Shandon Street means that it’s a new arts venue that people have been discovering slowly in the three months it’s been open.
“It is a bit out of the way, but that’s what made it affordable,” Geoff says. “I like Shandon: it’s an interesting part of town and there are a lot of characters around.”
A Culture Night event with performances from Electronic Music Council drew a crowd, and Geoff is keen to allow other connections to grow organically over time.
“I don’t think all that far ahead,” he says. “I just like to see where things go. You end up making connections you don’t expect to make. You don’t know what’s going to happen, so just make connections and see where you go. That’s the way I do my art as well.”
Nevertheless, Shandon’s potential as a cultural hub for the city is something he is keen to be a part of, to actively contribute to.
“I always think that if Shandon was in Italy, it would be flocked with tourists,” he says. “But it’s a difficult balance, because as soon as you start gentrifying places they lose all their character. You need a nice balance.”
The Laneway Gallery currently has open call for artists for approximately eight shows to be exhibited in 2023. More on the application process here.