Timing may not be everything, but it is important, writes Art Critic Aidan Dunne, after visiting some of this year's graduate arts shows.
Again this year, DIT's photographic degree exhibition, Photoworks 2007, was terrifically competent. If that sounds like faint praise, it is not intended to. The shows in the National Photographic Archive and the Gallery of Photography were of a thoroughly professional quality and featured a range of noteworthy individual projects, some of them really ambitious. Included here are Seamus Sullivan's Twenty Four and Laura McGovern's The Darkness Nourishes It. Sullivan took the well-tried 24-hours-in-the-life-of idea and produced something exceptional.
Each of his images is a one-hour exposure of a Dublin location that says something about the state we're in. Each is accompanied by an incisive text. The result is an exemplary piece of work and a fine exhibition in itself which deserves to be widely seen. In quite a different vein, McGovern took on the daunting challenge of responding to the fiction of cult Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, concentrating on the experience of solitude on the part of young, male protagonists. Her glittering, night-time images are eloquently atmospheric, rich and involving.
Other outstanding projects included Kerstin Hamilton's account of 24 hours in the delivery ward of the National Maternity Hospital (she has a real facility for portraiture), Angel Luis Gonzalez's imaginatively staged contemporary re-workings of mythic narrative, Robert Ellis's documentation of the Brazilian community in Gort and Maria de la Iglesia's look at Cubans living in Ireland. Miriam O'Connor, Helen de Lacy and Rachel Randell should also be mentioned.
Part of the success of the photographic show relates to the high level of presentation, which is time-consuming and expensive but inescapably important. A visitor to the graduate show in Limerick (which I couldn't get to) remarked that while much of the fine art work was of a good standard, painting suffered by comparison with print, partly because print had the august Church Gallery as opposed to the workaday studio spaces that housed painting. The context is important and merits a lot of effort and attention.
That's one major factor graduates have to contend with. Another is timing. While a graduate exhibition is the culmination of several year's work, there is, alas, no guarantee that it's going to catch you at just the right moment. There are, for example, several exhibitors in the Crawford in Cork who, while clearly good, seem on the verge of moving onto a whole new level of maturity and confidence. The trajectory of Hugh Delap's work, for example, towards a spare, minimally expressive vocabulary, with a burnt, subdued palette, is impressive, and the most recent pieces seem on the point of an exciting breakthrough.
The same could probably be said of others, including Rebecca Bradley, who has worked her way through to produce some outstanding textural paintings based on landscape, and Roisin Kinsella, and Tracy O'Brien, who has taken elements of Geraldine O'Neill's approach to still life and made something of her own with them. On the other hand, Mary Clancy has already made a breakthrough. Her small, precisely articulated, representational paintings are as multi-faceted as cut glass, opening out into complex spatial worlds. They are altogether there, accomplished by any standard, though the indications are that the next phase of her development might be to work as effectively on a much larger scale.
Drawing is often seen as a supplementary activity and given cursory attention, so it is particularly good to see Aoife Ní Labhradha's big, ambitious figurative drawings. Each work is a considered response to its subject, each viewpoint is carefully devised and each surface is treated overall, as a piece rather than as a simple sketch of a central motif. Brian Crotty's paintings are not as technically accomplished but they have a comparable empathy towards their subjects, and he works inventively with the charged, relational space between people. There's something really promising about his whole approach.
Julian Opie meets Gary Hume in Liam Murphy's impressive gloss-painted images, which are mostly of urban life. They are well made and he has an ability to encapsulate a subject in a single, spare image. In a beautiful sequence of open-ended, narrative photographic works, Jeannine Storan takes a darker, more introspective view of gender identity and desire. Darker still is Nessa Finnegan's abrasively parodic take on sexuality and commodification. There are two strong exponents of performance video in James McCann and Niamh Davis. Both emphasise language, ritual and endurance, though McCann's work can be particularly gruelling to watch. He is clearly related to the Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney lineage and, while Nauman is also important to Davis, she has a nice lightness that recalls Pipilotti Rist.
GMIT at Cluain Mhuire was more impressive in breadth than depth, in that the work was generally okay, if limited in its scope. There were some notable exhibits. Laura Brennan followed the popular contemporary strategy of building cumulative or composite treatments of a subject on the basis of myriad fragmentary details. Catherine Fleming made good use of a subtle grid language of colour. Language itself is important in Jean Purtill's paintings. Leslie Wingfield's underwater paintings of swimmers were very accomplished. Ann O'Connor developed a style of quiet, persuasive realism. Diana O'Boyle's studio in disarray managed to convey a sense of energetic possibility. Gillian Ahern's patterned abstracts displayed real feeling for colour and form. Grainne Tynan was one of many graduates preoccupied with childhood memories, family and memory in general. There were good sculptural installations by Gemma Coyne, Michelle Linnane and Alwyn Revill.
The DIT Fine Art degree show at Portland Row was adventurous. Jason Deans's Inform Yourself was a very well designed and delivered installation dealing with censorship and the control of information. Catríona Murphy's incised stone plaques considered our infatuation with celebrity culture, without decrying it. Clare Maguire displayed real flair for large-scale pictorial management in her installation Little secrets are best kept. Niamh Beirne found an effective metaphor for inherent personal obstacles in webs of nylon line.
Michelle Connolly not innovatively but effectively explored an obsessive preoccupation with self-image. All good, though there was a dearth of good painting and related activities per se.
Reviewed
Photoworks 2007, DIT BA in Photography graduate exhibition. National Photographic Archive and the Gallery of Photography Until Sat
Crawford College of Art and Design 07, CCAD, Sharman Crawford St, Cork Until Fri
Cluain Mhuire Art & Design Exhibition 2007, Cluain Mhuire Campus, GMIT
Stick a fork in me, I'm done, DIT Fine Art Graduate exhibition, DIT Portland Row
