A fortifying artistic experience at Kinsale

Reviewed: Eilís O'Connell and Clare Langan. Kinsale Arts Week, KAW Gallery, Pearse St, Kinsale until July 15, and Eilís O'Connell, sculpture, Charles Fort, Kinsale, until Aug 30 (Charles Fort entry charges apply, €3.70, €2.60, €1.30). Into Landscape, group drawing show. Macroom Town Hall Gallery, Macroom, until Aug 3

Eilís O'Connell's large-scale sculptures form the visual-arts centrepiece of this year's Kinsale Arts Week. A show of smaller works occupies a gallery space in the centre of the town but, rather more dramatically, a much larger collection of pieces is on view at Charles Fort just to the south. The star-shaped fort, one of two that once guarded the seaward approach to the town, is substantially intact and makes a stunning setting for the sculptures. Its architect, incidentally, was William Robinson, better known as the designer of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, which now houses Imma.

Although O'Connell was born in Derry, and was based in London for over a decade until 2001, she is in many respects a local artist.

She studied at the Crawford College in Cork before going on elsewhere, and she now lives in Co Cork. Especially in England, though also in Ireland, she has built up considerable experience in the field of large-scale public sculptures.

At the beginning of her career, it seemed as if she might follow the path of mainstream modernist abstraction, but other influences soon became evident in what she was doing. Her interest in a wide range of organic forms and processes, and in the manual skills and cultural symbolism of object-making in many different societies throughout history, considerably enlarged her sculptural vocabulary.

Her work has been variously interpreted and, indeed, she seems quite happy that it is open to various levels of interpretation.

She has a superb sense of form in the classical sculptural sense, something perhaps related to her positively obsessive feeling for finish. Finely burnished surfaces send the eye skating and gliding in search of an edge or a hollow, and edges and hollows are the main points of rest in most of the modelled works. She also makes constructed pieces, though, often with stainless-steel armatures and intricately braided cable. The rhythmic patterning of these sculptures is almost as impassive as the smooth surfaces of the modelled work.

The work at Charles Fort enters into a rich dialogue with its surroundings. Node, an elliptical form with a startling green finish, sits on the lawn like a flying saucer brought to earth. A trio of steel cable pieces, Sissl, Mendel and Lean, make up an architectonic counterpart to the network of spaces and structures of the fort, their silvery, densely patterned surfaces evoking the surrounding stonework. The three pieces also have distinct, quirky personalities, a quasi-human quality, and in a different way the human presence is also evident in Skirt, an elegant woven cone and a meditation on gravity. Inscape reverses the position of the fort in relation to its surroundings in that a tall oblong form is marked by an irregular slit that runs through it: a landscape within.

In its range and richness O'Connell's contribution to the arts week is exceptional. While many of the smaller pieces are beautiful in a relatively straightforward way, it's particularly interesting that they, and the larger works related to or entirely distinct from them, also have a tremendous sense of life about them, as though they are ready to make their way in the world.

The other main show in the programme features Clare Langan's visually dazzling post-apocalyptic trilogy of short films, all of which plunge us into disorientating worlds. We follow unnamed protagonists on apparently doomed quests as they negotiate familiar but devastated landscapes. Langan's tailor-made filters generate visual effects that look as if they cost a fortune to create.

'INTO LANDSCAPE'AT Macroom Town Hall (later touring to five other venues throughout the country) is an ambitious exhibition of drawing curated by Norah Norton and selected by Jim Savage. It is impressively installed in what is, perhaps surprisingly, a very good, spacious venue. Savage is himself a formidable draughtsman, and he has been involved in drawing in several other capacities as well, as curator, publisher and writer. He is someone who believes passionately in the importance of drawing as a means of expression and is apprehensive about the status accorded it in the contemporary educational context.

So, you could say, if he selected artists for a show of landscape drawings, they would want to make a convincing case for his argument that drawing is a fundamental human activity, a means of thinking out the world for us. This they do, on the whole. It is a diverse but harmonious exhibition, boasting some terrific individual contributions and a number of distinct, thoughtful approaches, including that of Arno Kramer (who currently has a solo show at Green on Red), himself a curator of drawing. Kramer's work combines sensitive representational accounts of the world, of landscape, figures, dwellings, with elements of patterns and grids. His works are usually layered, suggesting the passing of time and the accumulation of experiences and memories.

Philippa Sutherland's three-brush drawings, all fragmentary landscapes, are also outstanding. Made in a spare, descriptive style, her images are cinematic in the way they always seem to be excerpted from unspecified narratives. Their fragmentary nature is not a lapse or a drawback. Rather, like some other artists, Sutherland uses the idea of incompleteness - of illusion, of narrative and other conventions - as a way of questioning and exploring those conventions. Equally, Michael Canning's use of visual convention, including botanical and topographical illustration, imply that we see things in terms of representational constructions.

Jim Sheehy's charcoal drawings of winter trees are sensitively made, their tentative, searching lines and marks a counterpart to the trees' delicate conquest of space. There are other fine participants as well, including Richard Slade, whose drawings have great vigour and conviction, Joe Wilson, Jill Dennis, Stephen McKenna, Nick Miller, Brian Bourke, David Lilburn, Yves Berger and, not least, Savage himself. The project is a fine initiative on the part of Cork's Art Officer Ian McDonagh and the town of Macroom.