Reviewed: Talk Less Crawford College of Art and Design Honours Degree Show 2005, Crawford College of Art and Design, Sharman Crawford St, June 18-25
Auspiciously enough, the Crawford College of Art and Design's first BA Honours Degree exhibition fell during Cork's year as EU culture capital.
The graduates certainly rose to the occasion on both counts, producing a show that was generally strong, with many highlights and a consistently rich texture - in fact, too rich a texture at times.
If there was one dominant flaw, it was a tendency to cram in more than enough, though obviously that doesn't apply when there being more than enough was the point, as with, for example, Kevin Tuohy. What was most striking about the show, though, was the sheer strength of personality evident in so many works. This was a year of distinctive, individual, forceful voices.
None more so than Jim and Margaret, the pseudonymous partnership of Cian McConn and (another pseudonym) Sticky. Just to confuse things, they exhibited both individually and together. Together, as a pair of latter-day Situationist art-activists, parodying social and personal conventions, they set about behaving flamboyantly in various public settings. Evidence of their stormy relationship was visualised in an installation of a wrecked sitting room complete with photo album documenting their excursions.
At a time when artists have generally become more career-oriented, there is something encouraging about the persistence of such anarchic social interventions. Sticky and McConn were not the only artists to adopt a radical critical perspective. Kevin Tuohy's The Sausage Machine, an enveloping, shambolic installation fabricated mostly from brown paper, constituted an unlikely but effective assault on the coercive nature of institutional structures. Another Situationist at heart, Janet Ellis inventively posited art as an empty space in the social fabric, ripe for exploitation, and invited us to question and inhabit it ourselves.
The Crawford, though, also has a reputation to uphold as a centre of making, and it did so, with persuasive examples of painting and three-dimensional sculpture. Ciara Power's use of natural forms and materials, shaped and assembled into formalised, even ritualistic arrangements, recalled aspects of the work of Marie Foley and Tom Fitzgerald. Robin Daly's traditionally modelled and cast figures, offering an avowedly subjective account of pregnancy, birth and parenthood, were vivid, imaginative and strange, and had affinity with pre-Renaissance European figurative sculptures.
Jenny McCarthy also used imagery related to the idea of pregnancy and emptiness in delicate, beautifully textured, gourd-like forms. In terms of nominal categories, boundaries were freely crossed and ceramicists Eimear Allen and Amanda Clifford, together with sculptors Fiona Walsh and Stephen O'Shea, produced very capable works that used various approaches to body imagery. Walsh's ghostly, elongated cast body forms incorporated delicate fabric and buttons.
Straight-ahead painting was ably represented by several artists including Jean O'Farrell, whose concise statement - "Pink is my favourite colour" - set the mood for a group of casually stylised, boldly coloured compositions drawing on everyday imagery.
Frances McGonigle was one of a number of strong textural painters, including Sharon McCarthy, Aidan Smyth and Ellen Barrett. The lovely surface quality of their work doesn't reproduce and had to be seen at first hand. Ceramicist Margaret Love, incidentally, could be numbered in this company. Her lively, fluid pieces seemed to be inspired by the dynamism of the landscape and suggested the useful influence of Cormac Boydell.
Gráinne Ní Churrin looked like another interesting painter, but her sombre-hued work needed more light than was available in a difficult space. Sam Curtin's subdued, mellow abstracts were notably best on a small scale, while Grattan F Keating revisited Romanticism in dramatised landscape studies that teetered on the brink of excess.
Catriona Kelliher, on the other hand, worked with faint traces, echoes in photographs and paintings exploring her feelings about her grandmother's stories of her house being haunted. What came across is the way one senses departed presences in a building; in relation to which, several artists explored architectural spaces: Peter McMorris, Gary Kearney, Gearoid Hally, Bernard Fahey and Jonathan Croke. Kearney's pared down paintings of anonymous urban spaces were worthy exemplars of a contemporary genre.
Hally ingeniously conjured up some enclosed worlds. It is hard to mention Croke without referring to the German artist Thomas Demand. Like him, Croke makes exceptionally detailed architectural models and photographs them, producing images that look like the real thing. He carries off the difficult feat of approaching close to the work of another artist - in fact Demand is not the only person to do something like this - and yet making something distinctively worthwhile and his own. Where Demand makes bland, anonymous spaces, such as motorway tunnels and underground car parks, Croke managed to evoke the feeling of intensely atmospheric abandoned buildings. His models, which were part of his show, were in themselves terrific sculptural pieces.
Jane Butler and Wendie Young both produced fine video pieces not a hundred miles apart in feeling. In Butler's observant work, an eruption of movement jolted us into awareness. Young has a terrific photographic eye, evident in both her still landscape images and her hypnotic two-screen video, which aimed to present a simple, everyday action as though in a dream, and more than succeeded.
Other works that made an impression include Tanya Williams's attempt to push photographic practice into an otherworldly area; Martina Keane's bold attempt to convey a sense of the quality and texture of several intersecting, everyday lives in terms of a freewheeling photographic montage; Erika Hellmich's dreamy, artfully elegant arrangements of natural forms; Chie Mogi's dancing, clustered, geometric forms; Caroline Murphy's use of the prayer tree motif; and Deborah Marie Reynolds' audacious text installation in which a corridor was transformed by the application of a stencilled piece of text repeated over and over: "It's not what I expected either."
That's not everything worth recalling, but it does give something of the flavour of a particularly enriching show.
