Degrees of excitement

The graduate shows used to attract bargain hunters. Perhaps they still do, but things have changed. They have changed since the advent of the Young British Artists, since Charles Saatchi began to tour the colleges, buying up artists in bulk. Things here are not quite on that level, but as standards have risen and the degree and MA work has become more polished, young artists have a keener sense of its worth. Most graduates now invest a great deal of money, as well as time and energy, in their degree shows, particularly those involving elaborate installations. So while you will find accomplished work at relatively low prices, the sums are substantial enough to prompt you to be sure you want what you're buying.

Visiting graduate shows in quick succession is a daunting experience: so much work, so much effort, that you can hardly do justice to it all. Worse, you become ruthless, looking for something that will grab your attention immediately, and not for too long.

This year, the National College of Art and Design drew back to its Thomas Street headquarters from the RHA Gallagher Gallery, although it has a sizeable, labyrinthine campus. The Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design &Technology show is settling comfortably into its enlarged campus. The arts department of Dublin Institute of Technology, on the other hand, took the bold step of finding multiple venues concentrated in and around Temple Bar, including the National Photographic Archive, the Gallery of Photography and the Temple Bar Atrium Gallery.

In the north-west, meanwhile, participants in the fine-art degree show of the Institute of Technology, Sligo - the second year for the institute's degree - landed on their feet, in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery. This was on the one hand a wonderful opportunity and on the other a daunting prospect: a space that shows work well but is also likely to show up its shortcomings. In the event, the graduates acquit themselves well.

Another feature of the Sligo show is its concentration on painting. There is proportionately more of it than in any other fine-art degree show. Installation rules the roost at NCAD and in Dun Laoghaire. Video seems particularly prevalent at the former, including that old favourite the multiple monitor installation, so the place has more television sets than a bookie's.

There is an almost-there quality to much of the Dun Laoghaire fine-arts degree work, which is fair enough in many respects, marking the difference between degree and MA level. Many projects have an approximate, work-in-evolution quality, with much to recommend them. These include works by Sheila Mangan (painted versions of film clips featuring Hitler), Criodhna Costello (closed-circuit footage in the style of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge), Emmet Walsh (a Tony Oursler-like mixture of projection and puppetry), Mary Greene (making and projecting an image of the self), Martin O'Leary (Beuysian sessions with dead animals), Cliodhna Murphy (whimsical nature-culture video in the Caroline McCarthy mould) and Martina Kelly (documentary approach to themes of place, home and belonging).

Dara Harpur's painted figures use the idea of selective bodily exposure as a metaphor for psychic vulnerability and self-image. John Molloy's use of horror film idiom is remarkably accomplished, and altogether there in a Frankenstein-inspired meditation on nature and science.

While there is not a great deal of painting in the NCAD show, as nominal painters often end up working in other media, there are a few really interesting painters. They include the MA students Paul Doran, who has made a remarkable suite of process-dominated works, and Robbie O'Halloran (coincidentally, exhibiting at the Rubicon Gallery), who offers a cool inquiry into how painting can address the world.

On one level, degree student Mark Swords investigates the boundaries of the painting and the beginning of the world in a set of fine shaped pieces. Another Rubicon exhibitor, Tadhg McSweeney, has a nicely playful sense of humour in works that inventively combine chance and design.

Robert Armstrong, another MA student, is known as a painter but shows a video installation, inspired by the story of Sweeney and using the narrative as a platform for a meditation on nature and culture. A central, statically framed image of a waterfall presents nature as indifferent to our presence, while a figurative narrative presents the subject as alienated from both nature and social frameworks.

Daniel de Chenu, also an MA student - and a teacher of photography at Dun Laoghaire - shows Skyline, a dazzling, hypnotic video shot over an extended period and maintaining as a constant a horizon against which everything else shifts and changes.

In Sligo, Linda Hunt combines fluent, organic forms with a coolness of approach and a distinctive, subtle palette to produce some exceptional paintings. David Smith's beautifully surfaced abstracts nod towards Felim Egan and William Scott but find their own space. Malachy Costello's landscapes are best when he edits out elements of picturesque incident, but there's something there. Laura Mahon and Linda Hayden come across as impressively capable, thoughtful painters. There are painters elsewhere, but they do not really shine, although DIT's David Thomas works, is interesting.

Back in Sligo, Rosarie McHugh is somewhere between paintings and sculpture with some very nice collage pieces that recall classical cubist sculpture.Mark Gehan manages a multi-element installation very efficiently. Aida Bangoura's inventive, print-based work prioritises text but balances that preoccupation with an exceptional, almost Miroesque spontaneity. Daniel Chester's amended snapshots overwork a good idea: less would be more. Gavin Donoghue's effective, provocative drawing installation recalls the obsessiveness of some "outsider artists".

Of the DIT artists, graphic designer Fred Murray came up with a good fine-art project, showing the unpurchased work he made in the US as a beach portrait photographer.

Body, body image and body sense emerge across the board as a theme. In addition to the work of Harpur and Greene in Dun Laoghaire, they are in prints by Sorcha Sloan (DIT), in the work of Michael Murphy and Kathryn Watson (NCAD) and in the installation of Sarah Honner (NCAD), which doesn't quite deliver on a good premise, given that Mona Hatoum has been there, done that rather brilliantly. In her fine video, Andrea Laurent (NCAD) deals with fragility and recuperation.

Fine-art photography is very big internationally, something not reflected in the graduate shows, although Dun Laoghaire consolidates the strength of its photography department with its diploma-year students.

They include Ann Marie Curren, who has already garnered plaudits. To her credit, she offers not more of the same but a really good new body of body-related work. Gareth Paul Byrne slickly manipulates self-images. Alex McCullagh explores a domestic interior with tremendous sensitivity and concentration. Ruth Foran strikingly combines the divergent visual idioms of fashion and surveillance, and Jen Crawford makes beautiful images that convey a sense of subjective perception.

The tremendously atmospheric photographs by Theresa O'Toole of DIT, of a rural road illuminated by a car's headlights, do something similar in a different way. There isn't a lot of the topographic photography a rapidly changing environment would seem to invite, but an interesting exception is Elaine Brown of DIT, whose images of large-scale development do not get quite enough - or appropriate - room.

In fact, several DIT students make significant efforts in this area. It is, in all, a fairly low-key year for art graduates, but the general level of competence and presentation is impressive, and there are some artists we will be hearing much more of.

NCAD Exhibition 2001 continues until Sunday; the Model Arts and Niland Gallery is showing work from the Institute of Technology, Sligo until June 21st