Exhibiting a degree of ability - and then some

Visual Arts Growing by the year, and demanding because of the time it takes to get round them, the annual fine-art graduation exhibitions have nevertheless become must-sees.

Students at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology and Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) have already faced the music. Tomorrow work by students at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) goes on show at their Thomas Street base and elsewhere.

Last year, for some reason, was the year of the peephole. Umpteen graduates used them in their installations. Nothing has that ubiquity this year, but the peephole phenomenon hasn't fully gone away.

In terms of overall strengths and trends, NCAD performs very well, although Dún Laoghaire continued to build on its reputation for photography with exceptional diploma and certificate work. The diploma pieces were particularly polished, with hardly a weak note, remarkably. DIT's photography, if patchier, was also impressively well informed and thoughtful.

In the art world, painting is perpetually either on the way out or making a comeback. If NCAD is a barometer of trends, painting is currently on the up, as several seriously promising painters are in the show, notably Eoin O'Connor and Ciaran Murphy. O'Connor's architectural concerns were echoed in other shows but on nothing like a comparable level. NCAD sculpture is also generally ambitious and convincing.

A student graduating in fine art should be capable of producing work that is technically competent and historically aware, informed and literate within its discipline. That sounds as if the onus is on the student, but of course the institution has a responsibility to equip each student to do exactly that. It doesn't always work out, but in theory there should be a general level of competence.

Apart from that, though, it's up to the students to bring something else, something incalculable, to the proceedings - something that probably has to do with why they were drawn to fine art in the first place. This is much more difficult to recognise, nurture and assess. It may even militate against the smooth running of the other, more easily measurable aspects of academic practice.

As fine art has expanded to incorporate just about every conceivable material and technique, the problem of equipping students technically has become much more complicated. Institutions have struggled to catch up with no longer very new media and the kinds of opportunities they offer. Witness NCAD's MA in virtual realities, a title that evokes the world of Blade Runner or William Gibson. There is an appropriate preponderance of computer and video technology in the Digital Hub Warehouse, where the virtual-realities MAs are showing, but the diversity of means and media there would not look out of place in any section of any of the graduate shows. Julian King, an NCAD MA, actually takes the idea of virtual reality as his subject.

Although fine-art departments are still nominally organised into traditional categories of painting, print and sculpture, a painting graduate can, like Brendan Heery at NCAD, build a cabin in the woods as his work or, like Andrew Travers, make a record. Installation, video and photography run through any and all departments. Heery's cabin, incidentally, is a startling, atmospheric piece with myriad connotations. It's not painting, obviously, but there's something interesting going on. Likewise the extraordinary, darkly gothic pine-forest fantasy of the sculptor Daniele Gast. Then there's Finola Jones, whose MA presentation is a musical work for choir adapted from the soundtrack of a Tom and Jerry cartoon: anomalous but, as performed earlier in the year in Carlow, a strikingly successful public artwork.

Students who manage such coups de théâtre will always attract more attention than those who perform solidly if more conventionally, which is a little unfair. Somewhere between is Niamh Dunne's work, which is understated but engagingly ingenious: floral wallpaper sprouts from the wall, plant stems acquiring botanical name tags as it does so.

Equally, Kathlyn O'Brien's dreamlike sculptural installation is quietly compelling: we peer through the windows of a complex architectural structure to find waves lapping inside, the sea mysteriously contained within.

Enagh Farrell is a high-profile print-maker. Her vivid images of a blurred, troubled presence are striking, and the case is clinched by her video installation, which is amazingly accomplished.

There is a real sense of working things through in the fiercely argued monochromatic paintings of Rita McLoughlin, another MA. Their subject matter is grand architectonic spaces and details, perhaps a metaphor for a workable personal space.

Mary Noonan's paintings explore the disparity between idealised and actual landscapes in the west of Ireland. Glenn Loughran looks like being a formidable conceptual artist with much to offer. The work of Cora Cummins, Margaret Corcoran, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Robert Christian, Sharon Lee, Kate Minnock, Katie Blackwood and Anthony Macken all merit serious attention - as could be said of Anita McCarthy, Alan Mongley and Oscar Lawless at Dún Laoghaire and Ben Readman, Judy Lawler, Gary Brady and Kevin Murphy at DIT.

Anthony Haughey, an NCAD MA and a photographer with a significant record, highlights questions about representation in his installation on Srebrenica. Of the DúLaoghaire photographers Martin Cregg and Maria Kelly produced thoughtful series of works that engage with Ireland's changing landscape and identity. Derek Logue's scout portraits suggest he is a talented photographer of human subjects. Sonja Suominen's impeccable studies of deserted auditoriums are in the mould of contemporary German photography.

Empty spaces loomed large - in, for example, Patricia Chen's nicely unsettling documentary images of a television set and David Blackmore's communal sites by night. David Laudien explored personal space in public places in a staged set-up rather in the manner of the Canadian Jeff Wall.

Coming from a fine-art base, Phil Quinn's nature images were haunting and atmospheric, and Pauline Rowan's self-portraits as a nomadic visitor in idealised domestic showrooms had real possibilities. The latter bore some relation to the appealing images of lone, listless figures in anonymous hotel bedrooms by Sandra Eckhardt of DIT.

Among other DIT photographers, Attila Tassy's staged tableaux broadly satirised the years of the Celtic Tiger economy. Deirdre Donoghue's images of children were imaginatively designed and worth further exploration. Work here and elsewhere dealing earnestly with such issues as self-image, family history and identity was never less than competent, but, although it seems harsh to say it, not enough besides. By contrast, the bravely spare mother-and-child drama of Mary Kelly, an NCAD MA, is a model of concision, and Katrina Maguire's video installation on memory is rich and subtle.

Perhaps spurred in part by the anti-globalisation protest movement, idealism is making a comeback. It's in work by Annette Ryan, Stephen Gunning, Gareth Kennedy - whose hybrid installation reflects the aspiration of finding an alternative way of living - and Sarah Browne, whose project, oddly reminiscent of a television makeover show and involving the recycling of sofas, was amazing. Deirdre Morrissey of DIT produced some striking work that dealt imaginatively with illegal immigration.

NCAD's degree and MA exhibitions are at 100 Thomas Street, Dublin 8, the Digital Hub Warehouse, 10-13 Thomas Street, Dublin 8, and the Hugh Lane Gallery, Parnell Square, Dublin 1, from tomorrow until June 22nd