This year's Kilkenny Arts Festival features work from the populist to the esoteric, some of it put together on a shoestring, writes Aidan Dunne.
The inevitable talking point of this year's Kilkenny Arts Festival was the collapse of the Belfast Agreement, which didn't survive the opening weekend. In the end it was brought down not by political stonewalling or disputes over decommissioning but by heavy winds. The Agreement, Shane Cullen's monumental public sculpture, incorporated the entire 11,500-word text, digitally engraved into polyurethane panels. After surviving an extensive tour it came to grief in the grounds of Kilkenny Castle, where gusts of wind apparently overwhelmed the supports designed to hold the panels upright.
It was terrible for the artist and perhaps even worse in another way: it was hard not to see its toppling as weighted with unfortunate symbolism. During the week the crates containing the broken panels were lined up on the castle lawn like coffins. At least the castle's staff, realising there was a problem, had cordoned off the sculpture to ensure that nobody was injured. And if the panels are repairable, the idea of a patched-up, resuscitated Agreement would also have interesting connotations. (The population of Kilkenny, incidentally, voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Belfast Agreement at the time.)
Cullen's work was a happy medium between high seriousness and accessibility. Otherwise, the festival programme, which concentrated on sculpture, tended to lurch from the populist to the esoteric. The former was exemplified by the puppet tableaux of the US artist Pat Keck, at Butler House, the latter by Alan Phelan's cryptic series of installations, called Gordon-Bennett, at Grennan Mill, in Thomastown. Keck's fairground figures, with their interactive components and homespun allegories, try a bit too hard to please. They overlap with Jim Collins's cut-out Watchers, sited here and there through the town. One of them, for example, witnessed the whole Agreement disaster.
In Gordon-Bennett Phelan treats his subject much like a vulture circling its prey, keeping it in sight but staying at a distance. His disparate installations feature several direct or oblique references to James Gordon Bennett, - proprietor of the New York Herald, "playboy, daredevil and philanthropist" who sponsored both Stanley's search for Livingstone and the first international motor race in Ireland - whose name has entered the language as an exclamation. Lots of promising material there, surely. But Phelan keeps circling, and waiting, and although it is intriguing the project has an air of endless preparation, never quite coming together.
Writing in the festival's visual-arts publication, Noel Kelly casts some illumination on Phelan's concerns but self-combusts in the last sentence: "Nothing is new here, there is nothing to see, and yet we are held accountable only to ourselves by the very provision of what is very much with each of us." Perhaps the text became garbled along the way, but as it is this sentence seems to mean nothing at all, not a thing.
Not all visual-arts events are formally part of the festival. The Butler Gallery exhibition is traditionally a parallel feature that nevertheless contributes a great deal to the overall tone. And, south of Kilkenny city, Sculpture At Kells, back after a brief, enforced absence, has developed in its short history (and on minimal resources) to become a remarkably ambitious and noteworthy fixture. There are other ancillary shows, including some stunning Norwegian contemporary jewellery at the National Craft Gallery, Philip Cullen's mixed-media audio-visual work at the Watergate Theatre and fringe - labelled Verge - shows.
Worth mentioning here is Ailis Phelan's Universal Map, included in a group show, Endangered. One cannot help but notice that Kilkenny is a magnet for tourists. Throngs of them work their way through the castle on non-stop cycles of guided tours. Phelan's map wittily addresses the phenomenon of tourism and the idea of place. Dispensing with the formality of street plans and names - all of which blur into sameness anyway - her otherwise blank fold-out guide to orientation reassuringly and irrefutably informs the traveller: You are here.
The Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto is known for his playful use of unorthodox materials and effects, notably Lycra and Styrofoam, in the creation of architectonic installations that offer enveloping sensory experiences. He visited the Butler Gallery to give it a once-over. Working his way through the sequence of rooms that culminate in a larger, square space reminded him in some way, he reports, of a particle accelerator. That is, one of those hugely complex devices in which beams of subatomic particles are accelerated and smashed into one another, the before and after stages of which provide glimpses of what might be going on under the skin of what we assume to be reality.
He conceived the idea of a show based on what might be described as a series of collisions. He would effectively be the particle that collides with the work of several artists who are "all part of my primitive history, each one in a different way". It is an audacious scheme. As he says, he is not curating, not putting together a show of their work. Rather, he asked them to trust their work to him to respond to as he felt appropriate.
It helps to know this before you work your way through his exhibition, Four Artists And I. Otherwise it would be hard to make sense of the sheer range of objects and devices you encounter, and because the accelerator image is exactly right. In other words, his idea works. He really engages with several sets of quite different work, inventively and provocatively.
Carlos Bevilacqua's ingenious and elegant pieces actually suggest the language of particles and trajectories, and Neto engineers a meeting of minds. Fernanda Gómez's tiny, subtle interventions allow him to be himself, and he duly delivers an all-singing, all-dancing device with some of his trademark materials and qualities: Lycra, sand, the perpetual-motion interplay of such opposites as lightness and heaviness.
Franklin Cassaro's topologically inspired rearrangements of form inspire a direct collaboration. Tatiana Grinberg's pool of plasma invites the participation of the observer. Your hand becomes a print that will in time revert to blankness. To accompany this process Neto provides a huge, pliant mattress that accepts the imprint of bodies - and is a big hit with children, clearly putting them in mind of bouncy castles.
The show is quirky and likeable, but remember: it demands patient, close observation before you reach the end room and start playing with plasma and cushions.
And so to Sculpture At Kells, which benefits as ever from its stunning location, in the remains of a huge priory on the King's River. It benefits, but the location is also a challenge, as it will ruthlessly expose anything that doesn't come up to scratch. The person who could be described as this year's star guest is the British sculptor Glynn Williams, and his seven pieces - cast bronzes and stone carvings - look terrific among the stone walls and spaces of the priory.
Most of the pieces are inventive sculptural reworkings of a cubist approach to deconstructing figures. One is a literal quotation of a Picasso, one a homage to van Gogh; the segmented, rearranged figures work incredibly well, partly because Williams has a very sure sense of form. His relatively straightforward carving of a seated female figure, the pattern of her dress cut directly into the limestone, is exemplary of his competence, flair and playfulness. That's evident as well in his etching-like still lifes. It's worth going to see his pieces alone.
There is more, however, including a haunting installation called My Mother's Dresses by Sharon Kallis, beautifully subtle figurative pieces by Ginny Hutchison, a virtually invisible intervention by Wendy Lewis and Alan Mongey's tiny Populoss figurines. With other worksby Cathy Carman, Mary Butler, Paul Vanstone and more - Alanna O'Kelly did a performance piece at the opening - there are no weak notes.
Also on the Verge, Debra Bowden's Home, at the Berkeley Gallery in Thomastown, occupies an intermediate space between painting and print. In fact Bowden works cleverly with a mixture of incised and painted plywood to produce several series of atmospheric images that use doors and windows as metaphors for place and belonging. Her Memories Of Winter are windows. Her influences include Oriental printmaking and painting, and with Tree II and Dancing Tree she has produced beautiful elongated compositions reminiscent of Chinese scroll painting but also thoroughly Irish.
Festival exhibitions and Sculpture At Kells run until Sunday; Four Artists And I runs until October 17th
