Aidan Dunne is impressed by the range of visual work at Kilkenny Arts Festival.  He examines works by sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard and Kilkenny-based jeweller Rudolf Heltzel, amongst others.

In a click-on-the-icon era, when technology tries to persuade us that reality's rough edges have been smoothed down, Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculptures in A Psychological Landscape, at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny for the city's arts festival, are almost frighteningly made. They are clearly the products of lengthy physical labour and have no intention of apologising for that. Their gruff, forceful presence, ruffled textures and copious annotations in pencil attest to the exacting, painstaking way they came into being.

Von Rydingsvard was born in Germany during the second World War and spent much of her early childhood in refugee camps there, until her family got to the United States in 1950. Despite her name she is not German. Her Ukrainian father and Polish mother were forced to work on a farm in Germany. Not surprisingly, when she began to make art a great deal of her work addressed her memories of this time.

She began as a painter and switched to sculpture, and there is something painterly about the surfaces of her pieces. Over time she has devised a highly individual, even idiosyncratic way of working. She builds her sculptures from the ground up in uniform beams of aromatic cedar, marking, cutting and carving - with a saw - as the piece grows.

It's a method that allows both calculation and improvisation, a bit like drawing in three dimensions. She responds to an intuitive inner sense of what she is working towards rather than any preparatory studies.

While she emerged, as an artist, from an era of minimalism, unlike minimal sculpture her's, as well as having that characteristic rough-hewn physical presence, is replete with images and associations. The bowl or vessel is a favoured form and could be interpreted as being about making a space, in a stubborn, assertive way, for memory. It also has powerful domestic associations, as do many of von Rydingsvard's other forms, such as ladles and the remarkable lace medallion. The most striking piece is probably an enormous bowl, but there is also another exceptional work, Floating Staircase, in which a "skin" of stairs seems to float over a dense, intractable mass of cedar beams.

Her work is stringently disciplined and straightforward but also complex and rich with implications. The work in Kilkenny was made for the Butler Gallery, and it makes a terrific exhibition, one that really should be seen in situ.

Outside, H. A. Schult's ragtag army in Bin Soldiers is arrayed on the lawn of Kilkenny Castle. Schult makes his life-size figures from all kinds of rubbish, including discarded drinks cans, metal offcuts, defunct computers and other consumer detritus, all roughly bound with masses of unpleasant-looking expanded polystyrene. He has made a lot of these figures and, in a gesture that parodies the grandiosity of the army of Chinese ceramic warriors, he has installed them in key sites around the world, including the Great Wall of China, the pyramids of Giza and Red Square, in Moscow.

He has deployed thousand-strong armies in some of these places, but there is nothing like that number in Kilkenny. In fact, given the vastness of the castle grounds, there are perhaps not enough figures to make a concerted impact. Up close, the figures are clearly, literally rubbish. They are also oddly offhand, carelessly flung together despite the occasional flourish of detail. The work invites thoughts of our capacity for generating waste as consumers but is ultimately ambivalent.

Anna Hill's Auroral Synapse, made with the audio artist Iarla Ó Lionáird, at Grennan Mill is a chill-out experience in more ways than one. To a mellow, Sigur Rós-like soundtrack, footage of the aurora borealis is projected on screens and on a floating, diaphanous veil. There is an interactive component in that the observer's breathing can influence the intensity of the light in the images. It is an agreeable, visually striking experience, with perhaps one screen too many in terms of the design of the installation.

Hill shares Grennan Mill with the writer, sculptor and illustrator Edward Carey, who shows a number of works related to his books Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva. All of the pieces, including an elaborate installation, relish the gothic and the arcane, exploring the extreme, obsessive mentalities and imaginative states of characters who seek to control or reinvent the world. The most arresting image is a ventriloquist's dummy relating to a work in progress.

Anne Madden's paintings about loss and transcendence look exceptionally good at Gallery One. Emblematic images, including a simple cross and a dove, point to her underlying concerns. Finely worked, her work is distinguished by exceptional texture and a quality of touch.

The word painterly has often been applied to the work of the Georgian-born, Ukraine-based film director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990), whose interest in his Armenian heritage and liking for surreal imagery caused him some problems with the Soviet authorities. Art Without Borders at Butler House gathers together some of his whimsical collages and drawings, together with some very inventive hats, made during five years in prison in the 1970s. The work is interesting in context - the hats are particularly good - though his films stand as his testament.

Rudolf Heltzel, the Kilkenny jeweller, usually uses his gallery for a solo show by an artist who is doing something daring or unorthodox in jewellery design. This year, for the first time, the artist is himself. He was prompted to create this body of work by coming upon a number of uncut gemstones. In a series of spectacular body ornaments he has used these stones, singly or in combination, with intricately worked gold. There is a basic division between pieces that hinge on single, symmetrical shapes and more complicated, composite designs. The simpler forms are elegant and beautiful.

Heltzel's achievement in the more complex pieces is to set up a series of dialogues between the textures and structure of the stones and the linear elaborations of the finely worked metal. The result is an amazing body of work.

The photographer Suzanna Crampton exhibits a selection of her work on the Quays in Thomastown. She uses a method of processing that reverses the colours of her subjects. But that reversal is only part of the way her images distort our perceptual habits. She has a knack for homing in on familiar subjects - animals, plants - and abstracting details that render them unfamiliar.

Her work is painterly in its great sensitivity to colour and texture, but it is entirely photographic, which is hard to believe when you look at some of the effects she achieves.

This year the festival is notable for the sheer number of official and unofficial ancillary events, such as Crampton's. At the Ormonde Hotel, for example, there is a discreet though substantial display of work by six painters, Francis Tansey, Brian Ferran, Ger Sweeney, Brian Ballard, Neil Shawcross and Brian Bourke.

Steven Aylin shows stylish, stylised landscapes at the Watergate Theatre. Ramie Leahy's Ship Of Fools at Le Bodega Leahy is an allegorical series of paintings. Ceramics: Three Plus Three at the National Craft Gallery juxtaposes three Irish and three UK-based ceramicists. Kilkenny artists feature at County Hall and Full Circle amounts to an art trail in itself, encompassing work in several venues and, in the form of photographs by Jacqui Dempsey and Lindsey Perry, throughout the streets.

Kilkenny Arts Festival ends on Sunday; some of the exhibitions run on. Call 056-7752175 or see www.kilkennyarts.ie for more details