Creativity in abundance as graduate artists go that extra mile

VISUAL ART:FINE ART GRADUATE exhibitions at Cork's Crawford College, Limerick School of Art and Design and the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), reflected the generally high standards already seen in the Dublin shows, writes Aidan Dunne.

Each of the three boasted (and in the case of the Crawford, boasts, as the show is still running) individuals who could already be described as exceptional. This is partly a matter of timing. A graduate exhibition is not the same thing as sitting your finals: you're expected to bring something else, something more to the process, and that extra something may take years to become apparent. Julian Campbell, writing in the Crawford catalogue, refers to it as creativity, accurately and simply enough one might think but, as he points out, it's a term that has largely fallen out of fashion in the art world.

The Crawford prides itself on its openness to traditional media, to students' long-term engagement with materials and processes in terms of paintings, drawings, sculptures. That is one model of what an artist might be. Another is of someone with an open mind as regards materials and processes, whose task is to engineer appropriate cultural interventions and, if necessary, enlist the necessary artisanal skills to lend them whatever material form is called for.

There's a bit of a fault-line here, because it does seem that many art students still hold to the view that they can do anything and it will be okay by virtue of the fact that they are artists and what they make is art.

Does the Crawford live up to its reputation with regard to traditional media? It does, and without any hint of coercion. It's clear that students are free to follow other avenues - witness Michael Doocey's multi-screen video installation, an open narrative that hints at the eventual cost of early injury, Janina Matthews' wonderful Japanese-themed display, Annette Persson's performance video on gender identity or Angela Fulcher's exuberant exploration of alternative social possibilities: all outstanding work of great merit.

One feels that students have been encouraged to go for it, to push their engagement with materials. Gemma Kearney's colourful painted assemblages recall Jessica Stockholder but they have their own distinctive energy, poised between anarchy and order. Sarah Kearney uses one of the oldest sculptural processes, bronze casting, to make work that is thoroughly contemporary and provocative. She collected discarded items, including a banana skin, from the street and cast them, translating them into a different cultural league, as archaeological artifacts. And they are beautiful, as are her larger pieces (including those evocative of images of Iron Age bodies preserved in peat bog).

It should come as no surprise that straight-ahead painting is difficult and, in truth, not a lot on view rises above the routine, including much portraiture and figure work (though there's a promising, engaging intimacy to Sally Fennessy's carefully-made paintings). Landscape and the sea elicit responses with potential from Elayne O'Connor and Honora O'Neill. Eveleen Murphy's intricate collage paintings express a distinctive, interesting sensibility and Dervilla McAuley's passionate pictorial rhetoric is to be commended.

Much painting that tends towards more muted abstraction - and this is true of all the shows - falls down in terms of the sheer quality of surface and touch. It just doesn't have the necessary sense of substance.

Drawing, as a constituent element or in itself, is strongly present. The best drawings per se are Nancy Craddock's labyrinthine descriptions of engines, which have great vitality and are about the ghost in the machine quality of something that is, ostensibly, purely mechanical. Several graduates use photography well, including Rona Neligan, Emer Douglas (who pins down a specific, delicate atmosphere with admirable sensitivity) and Sinead Donnachie. David Killeen drove around the Irish coast over an eight day period and his work documents his journey in a factual, almost hypnotic way.

GMIT'S ART AND design exhibition, incorporating a bewildering number of courses and levels, can be hard to make sense of, but there was something well worth seeing in every part of the building and at every level of study. Several individuals stood out. Sculptor Dee McDonnell produced a range of rich, detailed work encompassing performance, photography and three-dimensional pieces, all in terms of relating and mismatching the body with a series of functional objects in the context of cultural and social conventions. It was witty, deadpan and very promising.

In quite a different vein, Tom O'Dea made a series of impeccable works interrogating the basic constituents of the materials of painting, titled after Alberti's treatise Della Pittura. Each piece meticulously pursued a related though distinct line of enquiry with great ingenuity. Róisín Furlong translated her exhibition space into a classroom incorporating multiple minor pieces and at least one larger, terrific piece with the garden shed as its subject. Marie Monaghan took a perilously hackneyed material - peat - and used it very effectively in a very focused, disciplined performance video work. Equally atmospheric was John Hennessy's wooden jetty over the River Styx and Kieran Lyons's mad scientist models of the human mind.

Diane Reid's mostly ceramic based sculptures, with the doll as the dominant motif, were exceptional, incisive, beautifully judged and deftly made, and precisely observed - if I wasn't dreaming them, that is, because I couldn't find any trace of her name subsequently in the show's catalogue. Monica Laskowska used folded sheets of porcelain in pared down, eloquent sculptural pieces. In their lively works by Siobhan Lynch (fabric collages illustrating "awkward and unpleasant moments" in people's lives) and Corey Naughton (staged photographs) fared better in tackling figurative themes than did many figurative painters.

FOR THE NEXT academic year, Limerick's sculpture department moves into the revamped Clare St campus, so this was the last time the sculpture show occupied the George's Quay buildings. It ended on a high note, with a diverse, strongly characterised, edgy range of work, punctuated by Kate Moylan's large-scale photographs of bodies exhibiting evidence of subtle and not-so-subtle mutations, with reference to iconic art history subjects including Botticelli's Venus.

Equally disturbing, Padraig Robinson's writhing, truncated figure looked like a homage to Robert Gober, one echoed, oddly enough, in another piece, by Sinéad Conlon in which a figure is half buried beneath a heap of potatoes, which came across as a meditation on Ireland's ties to the potato. Among the painters, Laura McMorrow stood out, making thoughtful, considered pieces on a variety of recycled, discarded supports, forever pushing the logic of images and ideas. Not to say that others didn't impress: Catherine McConnon had a tremendously sensitive grasp of the nuances of surface and marks. Using a visual language referring to erasure and disappearance, Rory Prout dealt with different kinds of political protest. Paraic Leahy had an abundance of ideas and fruitfully pursued several, including an enquiry into the links between painting-object-photograph through the medium of the Polaroid.

Sarah Bolger has a real gift for framing images of poised glamour (but should have lost those frames); Alan Bennett is a formidable performer with dramatic ability; Gemma Brannigan has a feeling for the poetics of spaces; in her work Catherine Penney used rubbish inventively, and in her photographs Carol Kennedy ventured into that fascinating space between the visible and the invisible, prompting us to sense a world that we could never quite see. It was a good year.

Soup: Degree Show '08, Crawford College of Art Design, Cork, until tomorrow; GMIT Graduate Show 2008, Galway; Limerick School of Art Design Degree Exhibiton, Clare St Campus and George's Quay, Limerick.