A review of visual arts by Aidan Dunne

In her Peppercanister exhibition, Place, Ruth McHugh's work takes the form of photographic prints, mostly, plus some mixed-media drawings. But to say that the work is simply photographic would be misleading. For the most part, the prints themselves are only the tip of the iceberg. They document painstakingly fabricated sculptural installations and, more, some of them are not only site-specific but time- specific. In other words, the images we see are physically made, but they are only manifested at a specific moment. They become visible and then effectively disappear, and McHugh captures their fleeting appearances.

This is so in the show's remarkable, composite centrepiece, 5320.316N 00614.914W. The title notes the coordinates of a geographical location. We see radiant images of a chalky white surface. It looks as if it might be a whitewashed wall, but we are given no indication of scale. Against the random markings of the rugged surface texture, the unmistakable outlines of a map of the world are apparent. The effect, as we look at it, is that of the map magically materialising, delineated by a ray of flaring sunlight.

It's a moment of illumination, both literally and metaphorically. This epiphanic quality is a recurrent feature in McHugh's work. It emerges from her consistent use of a set of related ideas and images. The ideas have to do with time, memory, loss, a sense of place, identity and an almost hypnotic state of recollection and meditation. Among the key images are those of the domestic space, perhaps abandoned; the container, such as a box or chest; something handed down or inherited; the worn, weathered, crumbling surface. There is inevitably a note of melancholy to such material, balanced by the extraordinary incandescent lightness with which McHugh imbues her images. She has a liking for silvery white light and uses it with painterly fluency in her photographic pieces.

All this is clearly instinctive rather than prescriptive on her part, incidentally. Her aesthetic sense has to do with her very particular sensibility. She is drawn to images that somehow articulate aspects of that sensibility. They can necessitate a process of careful construction and preparation, but they can also be encountered intact, as in Pool or Chair. Both of the latter are documentary records of scenes chanced upon, yet both are also entirely in keeping with the most overly fabricated pieces. You can feel the weight of your glance being directed and focused: looking is endowed with a gravity of its own.

McHugh consistently works from the local to the global. Appropriately so, for she has devised a pictorial vocabulary that is personal and specific while referring to areas of experience that are so universal as to be easily comprehensible. It's a beautiful, haunting show.

Isabel Nolan's Everything I said let me explain, at Project, is quiet and understated. It is designed to be experienced piecemeal and obliquely, as though the visitor has wandered into someone's space, a work in progress rather than an "exhibition" as such. A looped, short, simple animated film plays on a monitor set casually atop a table. Apart from that, the bulk of what we see is composed of drawings, including some displayed flat beneath the glass surface on which the monitor rests.

The stated rationale goes something like this: Nolan has been making portrait drawings of a friend of hers for a number of years. Several of the drawings - spare, cautious, linear pencil studies - are included. In the animation, Quiet, please, the same friend, waking, is caught in that moment of disorientation between sleep and wakefulness. We see a coloured, circular form of concentric rings that resembles the aperture of a lens. Hand-written script unfolding across the screen asks whether we are free and how we can know who or what we are.

Other works on paper feature a dog, a spider in its web, a fragment of an evergreen leaf, circular forms, and a collage in which the columns of type on a newspaper spread, including an obituary page, have been neatly covered over. Could it be that there are two opposed but complementary strands here? On the one hand, there is the comfort of familiarity: the friend who is, so to speak, a known quantity, a comfortable presence, and the dog, a symbol of loyalty. The world is orientated around such a web - hence the spider - of presumptions and cumulative expectations, built on a process of induction. On the other hand, there is uncertainty.

To put it at its most extreme, you could say that the repeated attempts to confirm the friend's presence mask an abiding sense of estrangement, distance and absence. Even the definitive obituary, neatly encapsulating the facts of a life, misses the point, Nolan seems to imply. The strangeness of life and the unknowability of people eludes the statement of facts. This is, at any rate, one possible reading of the clues she offers.

Just ended at the Graphic Studio Gallery, Yoko Akino's When the Wind Blows featured a series of studies of individual, semi-nude figures. Outlined in economical, elegant line, the figures, mostly female, were headless and handless, but their poses and demeanour indicated anything but trauma or distress. They were poised and relaxed.

It was a strange, disconcerting device. Akino suggested that she wanted to convey a universal quality in her figures, not to tie them down with individual personalities. So that what we see most commonly of a person - head and hands - is rendered invisible and what remains for the most part unseen, the body, is exposed. Without question there was a light, playful touch to the work - heightened by Akino's feeling for bright colour and pattern - but also a slight edge of anxiety because of what was missing.

Ruth McHugh: Place, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until May 10 (01-6611279)

Isabel Nolan: Everything I said let me explain, Project Gallery, Dublin, until May 7 (01-8819613)

Yoko Akino: Still the Wind Blows, Graphic Studio Gallery, Dublin (01-6798021 - gallery closed until May 15)