The graduation shows now exhibit a high degree of professionalism. Aidan Dunne, Art Critic, looks at some of this year's highlights
This year there are some brilliant things to be seen in the graduation shows at Dublin's National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire (DLIADT). Some brilliant things, a lot of very good, solid work and a surprisingly small minority of weak or misfired exhibits.
It used to be that good, accomplished work was rare in graduation shows, but - with a few significant cavils - it's just not like that any more. The general level has been edging towards professionalism and, in many cases, has arrived there. The result is that the bodies of work produced for graduation by many students would make creditable solo shows in the wider, public sphere.
This has been the case over the last few years and it is noticeable that, despite the significant growth of the curatorial profession in the Irish cultural sector, curators just do not seem to be getting to see and make good use of the work of students at graduate and MA level. It is as if they haven't quite caught up with the fact that student work is much more than it once was. There are exceptions to that rule of ignorance, more often than not in some of the commercial galleries or peripheral public spaces. The Ashford Gallery at the RHA, for example, actually has quite a good record in this regard.
In fact, RHA Director Patrick Murphy has remarked in interviews on more than one occasion that, on returning to Ireland from the US, it surprised him that there was simply so much still to be done in curatorial terms in Irish art in general (a good proportion of graduates in Irish colleges, incidentally, are not Irish, but they are still part of the Irish art scene). Perhaps part of the reason is a lack of self-confidence in the context of an intensely competitive and intensely modish international art world. It's been noticeable that, where curators have failed, the students have been spurred to action themselves. More and more students still in the midst of their studies are organising their own exhibitions, a trend noted by DLIADT's Director Jim Devine, among others. What is clear is that many of this year's crop of graduating students not only deserve the support of the arts infrastructure that we have in place, but would also greatly enhance that infrastructure. They have a lot to offer. Promising artists should be nurtured.
Some of the things that might be termed brilliant this year include those produced by Emily Falencki (NCAD) for her MA show. Her series of paintings of history's victims, indebted perhaps to Marlene Dumas, might have gone awry in any number of ways.
It's a very difficult area to tackle. In the event she has come up with a superb show, one that is painful, difficult to look at, both tenderly and unflinchingly observed, beautifully made, and quietly powerful. In itself, it makes a visit to the Digital Hub worthwhile, and there is hardly a weak link in the rest of what is a huge, generously presented group show.
In quite a different vein, Nina Canell's (DLIADT) installation Other lungs part 1 is a fantastically idiosyncratic, agreeably discursive piece of work that gently engages you, draws you in and wins you over. You're guaranteed to leave her show happier than when you arrived. As is the case with Atsushi Kaga's (NCAD) anthropomorphic fantasies involving rabbits in a number of roles, in paintings, drawings, sculptures and animations, all deftly made with a light touch and a wonderfully droll sense of humour.
Anna Rackard's (DIT) photographic portraits of Irish women farmers are outstandingly good. Part of her point is that she is documenting people who are generally, in social and iconographic terms, overlooked, virtually invisible. She restores them to rich visibility. Her response to character and her feeling for composition, context, texture and detail in the work are all striking.
Other outstanding individual exhibits have been produced by Caroline Donohue (NCAD), nominally a printmaker, who is remarkably capable across a wide range of media and forms and has a fine-tuned sensibility; Leda Scully (NCAD) a painter who takes the current style of understated representation and injects it with her own edgy sensibility; Maureen Burke (DLIADT) a promising painter working in the same neck of the woods; Eoin McHugh (NCAD), a technically adept draughtsman who delights in ironic quotation and pastiche; Lucia Barnes (NCAD), whose forceful installation jolts us into awareness of an entire area of experience.
Suzanne Mooney (NCAD) in her video work has real, painterly feeling for landscape; equally, Catherine Taylor's (NCAD) installation, inspired by The Burren, and using cast glass and video projection, is ethereal and beautiful; Clare Henderson (NCAD) makes fine drawings cleverly exploring absence, presence and disappearance; Jenny Morans (NCAD) has made a really exceptional installation and performance piece; Lisa Fingleton's (NCAD) sequence of powerful installations take us on a journey and a learning curve; Andrew McKernon's (NCAD) vivid, atmospheric installation explores links between physical and mental health; in its nature, detail and complexity, Eilis McDonald's (NCAD) installation is terrific, a startling glimpse into a mind.
Liam Campbell's (DLIADT) extremely well done photographic work is a treatment of the well-tried "nature is a construct" theme; Emelie Lindsrom (DLIADT) has a terrific sculptural piece; Catherine Nolan (DLIADT) is one of several artists to use mobile phone imagery well; Anne Craddon's (DLIADT) thread "drawing" is excellently planned and made; Elisha Clarke (DLIADT) and Ferdia MacLochlainn (NCAD) have comparable, witty takes on self-obsession and celebrity culture; Shelley Corcoran (DLIADT) achieves a sensitive exploration of presence in the photograph; Fiona O'Connor's wonderful text and photographic sequence Making a World of Difference is a gem; Yvonne Yelverton's (DLIADT) subtly observed documentation of pregnancy is an exceptional piece of work; Pat Burnes's (DLIADT) visualisation of obsessiveness is very effective; Tim Lloyd's choreographed performance combines elements of slapstick and dance incredibly well; Billy McCannon's (NCAD) work combines the direct testimony of prisoners with an exceptionally atmospheric film narrative, modelled on 1940s film noir; and Sofie Nuyts's (NCAD) photographs document a mischievously subversive take on urban culture and conventions.
There are many other graduates who are probably just as able as those mentioned so far. Any list of those with something exceptional going for them would include Juliette De La Mere, Bridget O'Brien Dolfi, Kieran Moore, Tadhg McGrath, David Martin, Kate Warner, Brian Murray, Olivia Rohan, Brendan Flaherty, Aimee O'Neill, Jenny Brady, Pat Jennings, Eimear Brennan, Roseanne Lynch (all NCAD); Louise Ward, Sinead Cunningham, Aya Sako, Leila Pederson, Rebecca Rafter, Rachel Kiernan (all DIT);, Gavin Redmond, Brigis Harney, Rachel Webb and Cathy Michael (all DLIADT). . .
Most years there are noticeable, general trends at art college degree shows. There was, for example, one year when every other graduate produced work using spyholes. For some reason, lovingly detailed, stuffy, claustrophobic sitting rooms have never gone out of vogue as appropriate installation subjects. They are still there this year, very capably done - Bryan Keane (NCAD) for example - and, as ever, oddly effective. Giita Hammond at DLIADT gives the theme a twist with her beautifully staged, nostalgic recollection of her grandparents' house in Iceland, which mingles sadness and affection.
As it happens, nostalgia is big this year. Given that most students are relatively young, there is a surprising emphasis on the process of memory and recollections of past times - Muireann Brady (DLIADT), Ruth Tutty (NCAD) - and often of happier times, of security and comfortable domesticity.
Brian Walsh (NCAD) goes further, offering a portrait of a building: a vast student residence block in Norway that houses 3,000 people. The building and the presentation evoke a particular moment of utopian modernism, with the clarity and rationalism of its design philosophy. Through earphones we can hear the lengthy book of rules being read, hesitantly. It is already another era.
Trends in art school work usually reflect wider art world trends. For this and recent years, that includes fragmentation: rather than one painting, say, someone will opt to show 23 disparate drawings of varying size and shape arranged casually in a big cluster. If you're going to do this it helps if you can actually draw, and drawing is still not an art school strong point, though there is more of it about, and some of it is very good. The tendency towards bittiness may relate to a sense of fragmentation in the world itself, a distrust of the idea of one authoritative narrative and a recognition of divergent, competing voices. Caroline Lynch (DLIADT) inscribes fragments of desire, Aspects of Adam, obsessive little drawings of the object of desire, onto various kinds of consumer packaging, themselves emblematic of desire.
To take one high-achieving department: DIT photography is impressively strong overall (DIT Fine Art, also generally good, was tight for space). Pretty much every graduate has organised their work around a coherent, critical, incisive project. The drawback is an underlying uniformity. Many of the projects are of the same type, taking the form of sociological or cultural inquiries. The dominant form is the large-scale, self-consciously posed portrait, following the example of several major German photographic artists, not to mention Rineke Dijkstra.
Yet there's no denying that the approach produces some great results. Apart from Anna Rackard, previously mentioned, Anna Magnusson's project, Access follows a similar pattern and is also extremely well done. Her portrait subjects are immigrants who make their living at jobs that don't reflect the level of their qualifications. Michelle Murphy explores tattoo subculture in abrasively forceful images; Mandy O'Neill depicts moody teenagers. Margaret Boland's elaborately staged tableaux featuring changeling-like children and toddlers are superbly done. Katja Hoffman explores the idea of "the medical gaze" in mapping a series of bodies. At DLIADT, meanwhile, Elaine Ryan made portraits of hardy sea swimmers.
Topographical projects also lend themselves to this taxonomic approach. Amanda Healy explores the growing phenomenon of the security-conscious gated community in Dublin. Hers is one of several bodies of work that make serious efforts to address the changing urban environment. At NCAD's Virtual Realities MA show, Lynda Devenney ingeniously explores the ways we have of personally mapping the city, and Eleanor Duffin's elaborate installation offers a voyeuristic voyage into a night-time world of deserted office spaces. The shows at DIT and DLIADT have come to the end of their runs, but you can catch NCAD all this week. Do it, especially if you're a curator.
NCAD Exhibition 05, NCAD Campus, 100 Thomas St and The Digital Hub, 10-13 Thomas St Until June 19 Cream DIT Expo 05, Broadstone Studios, National Photographic Archive and Irish Film Institute IADT Dún Laoghaire, Graduate Exhibition 2005, DLIADT Campus
