Bringing the Day of the Dead back to life

VISUAL ARTS: Once a year, in Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, the living visit the dead and the dead, figuratively speaking, live again. At the heart of sculptor Janet Mullarney's outstanding Crawford Gallery exhibition, The Bermuda Triangle, there is a sprawling miniature landscape of opened tombs and resurrected bodies, of humans and their attendant animal spirits, all washed with a soft, ghostly white pallor.

Reviewed:

Janet Mullarney, The Bermuda Triangle, Crawford Gallery, Cork (021-4273377), until November 30th

Margaret Fitzgibbon, Hortus Conclusus, Crawford Gallery Cork until November 30th

Victor Treacy Award 2002, Butler Gallery (056-61106) until November 24th

In this crowded spectacle, which is a bit of a tour de force, Mullarney conjures up a sense of a whole world, in which a mood of cheerful anarchy is underscored by darker notes of sadness and loss.

These latter sentiments are reinforced by the other elements of the show, including a row of tiny Mexican chairs "just the right size for sitting in and waiting patiently", as the artist observes in a brief accompanying note. More ominous still are the small strait-jackets mounted on the opposite wall, like butterflies, and a vivid little model of hell. You get the picture: life as an ante-room in which we are trained, or coerced, to conform, to know our place and do what we are told. Apart from the posthumous celebration, and recurrent images of caring and nurture, including a fine example of one of Mullarney's characteristic pieta-like pieces, it adds up to a fairly tough view of life.

Mullarney draws on a variety of customs and beliefs in devising what might be described as a personal mythological vision. The key to her work is perhaps the way different systems of belief and ritual address the same fundamental areas of human experience. We know her as a wonderful wood-carver, with a free, spontaneous style, something fully evident in one of her pieces at the Fenton Gallery earlier this month, The Thread. As this show demonstrates, she is a terrific modeller as well. Whether working with wax or clay, she has a beautifully eloquent touch and a real sympathy with her materials. A form may be minimally stated, coaxed from the clay with just a few deft gestures, yet still be extraordinarily expressive. The Bermuda Triangle confirms her as an outstanding talent and one of the foremost Irish sculptors.

As it happens, the Crawford is simultaneously showing another sculptural installation, Hortus Conclusus, by Margaret Fitzgibbon. The enclosed garden to which the title refers us is treated both literally and metaphorically. The gallery itself or, say, an artist's studio, might be regarded as a heightened, enclosed creative environment - as indeed might the womb. Correspondences between bodies and plants are pursued in a number of mythological and folklore contexts. And in a series of composite photographic images, the walled garden at Kylemore Abbey on Killary Harbour features as a haven of both horticultural and spiritual growth.

In one of her most inventive strokes, Fitzgibbon envisages a mythical serpent, Ouroboros, in the form of recycled copper piping threading its way around the gallery, curves, angles, joints and dead ends suggestive of the twining, self-consuming snake. Look close and you'll see buds sprout from pipe ends. A series of beautifully modelled and cast bronze plant forms are displayed in a vitrine. With so many elements, Hortus Conclusus is a work to see again and again, a meditative experience. This rich, complex and densely layered installation merits wide exposure and would certainly thrive in many different enclosed gardens - or galleries.

Given that the Butler Gallery's last exhibition, featuring the iconoclastic American performance and video artist Paul McCarthy, attracted the attention of the law, it is wryly appropriate that the first work you encounter in the current Victor Treacy Award show features a Garda uniform put to a novel use. Jessica Jones's prize- winning installation consists of an antique armchair upholstered with blue serge, complete with pockets and epaulets.

The chair faces a stuffed shirt, caught centre-stage like a suspect under an interrogator's spotlight. The garda-chair is a striking image of power: the comfort of privilege protected by authority and force. Jones's previous work has struggled to articulate a response to related issues. She was in Genoa during the brutal crackdown on the anti-globalisation movement. In her subsequent NCAD piece, it was as if she was overwhelmed by the experience. But now it seems she is really finding a way to deal with her concerns in terms of a visual language.

The three other shortlisted artists all show work of real quality. In Kristina Hoppe's slow-motion video, we see the facial reactions of children who dip their bare feet - and it is best if we don't realise this beforehand - into jelly. There are echoes of Bill Viola in the way she charts expressions and leaves us to project our own emotional readings onto them. Kate Byrne's large-scale colour photographs thrust us into bold, technicolour intimacy with the human body in a way that is disturbingly intimate and perplexing. Gail O'Reilly's degree show installation in Cork recreated a generic students' living space, atmospheric to the point of discomfort, and packed with random stuff that could be read as clues about the absent inhabitant or inhabitants.

Partly developed from a different section of that same show, her installation here features masses of jars in which are preserved not fruit but memories. A fast-paced video, cut to a techno soundtrack, flicks through what look like standard images of everyday life. Perhaps it all isn't quite there yet, but she is obviously an artist with real potential.