Imagining Utopia in Carlow

Anyone who thinks the Irish are indifferent to visual art should join the crowds at the Éigse festival in Carlow, writes Aidan Dunne

Recently, Sarah Glennie, the director of the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo, wrote a column in the Visual Artists' Newsletter headlined "Challenging the Lack of Belief". Her argument was that, while the contemporary visual arts are stronger than ever before in Ireland, a lack of institutional commitment and what might be described as a concomitant lack of audience commitment are serious impediments to progress in an international context. She undoubtedly has a point, but perhaps, as well, she should mosey along to Carlow this week, where Éigse is drawing in the local populace in droves.

The emphasis in Éigse is the visual arts. It a local arts festival in the sense that it stems from the immediate community and is exceptionally well-attended by that community. In tandem with the development of an arts strategy regionally, and especially with Visualise Carlow, the season of events leading to the opening of Visual, a centre for the visual arts, Éigse has grown increasingly ambitious in its programming, so it is local but also national and international in its scope.

Make your way to Carlow College (previously St Patrick's) and the Carlow Institute of Technology and you will encounter large numbers of people getting to grips with video installations, interactive social-sculptural events, wickedly satirical political allegories and abstract paintings, all with apparent equanimity. The sight of entire families agreeably absorbing what might be reasonably termed cutting-edge art in forms way outside the traditional formats of painting and sculpture prompts the thought that Éigse is doing something right.

Much contemporary art can irritate and alienate its potential audience, and not blamelessly so - it sometimes seems wilfully obscure and self-referential. Just on the law of averages, by no means all of it is going to be any good. And, conversely, something that is novel or different can blamelessly inspire irritation because it challenges comfortable certainties. As it happens, there is much that fits that description in this year's Éigse. Clearly not everyone is going to take on board everything they see in the show, but the festival has certainly delivered on one core purpose, that of bringing audience and artworks together.

THIS YEAR'S SHOWS have a theme and an umbrella title, Utopias. Several categories of work shelter under that generous umbrella, including works by invited artists and by artists selected from open submission, leaving some strands of the festival exposed to the elements: the showcase for locally based artists, Platform 059, and a distinct, extremely good show at Carlow IT, curated by Paddy McGovern. The IT, towards the edge of town, is off the beaten track, but it is really worth making the effort to see pieces there by Declan O'Mahony and several other artists.

Utopias, as curator Cliodhna Shaffrey points out in her catalogue introduction, "do not exist", the term deriving from the Greek for "nowhere". But the idea of Utopia is a seductive aspiration, one that has certainly done more than its fair share of harm, as work by several exhibitors suggests.

Twenty artists were invited to make work on the theme, and others submitting work for selection were asked to bear the theme in mind. Yet it's not a rigidly prescriptive scheme, more a bid to provide a framework within which both artists and audiences can approach the work with some commonality.

Some of the most ambitious pieces are Tallervo Kalleionen and Oliver Kochta Kalleinien's video dramas - Utopian soaps, for want of a better term - featuring the residents of four Utopian communities in Australia, in scenarios scripted by themselves.

Communal life is where Utopian dreams meet waking reality, and each of the dramas explores aspects of this interface. High production values and clear exposition make the work extremely user-friendly.

Equally ambitious is Irene Murphy and Mick O'Shea's "laboratory" of Utopian plans and ideas that allows scope for experimental play.

Amanda Healy's photographic research project, Safe, is exemplary in its meticulous exploration and documentation of some of the proliferating gated communities in Dublin. The conspicuous order and architectural blandness of the developments, with their defensive emphasis on security, are chronicled in carefully composed images. These suburban mini-Utopias project an image of safety and harmony, and necessarily depend on protection and exclusion, as do Utopias generally, exemplifying the human tendency, in AC Grayling's words "to pull up the ladder after climbing it" (his short essay on Utopias is incorporated in the catalogue).

The business of constructing Utopias is as much mental as physical, and Mary Ruth Walsh's White Goods is a group of works that ingeniously combine categories of objects usually kept separate to produce something ambiguous and provocative. In her video, sculptures and photographs, workaday kitchen implements and containers - graters, steamers, pots, all bright and metallic - are skilfully incorporated in ecclesiastical architectural forms. The effect is complex but, taken in all, the work provides a striking image of the way domesticity and "woman's work" is subsumed into and arguably exploited by patriarchal religious systems. Even to say this, though, is slightly misleading, as Walsh's considerable achievement is to have devised and made objects and images that engender rather than illustrate ideas. White Goods is one of the highlights of Éigse.

DESMOND SHORTT, KNOWN for paintings in which playful, kitsch fantasies are allowed free rein, becomes more pointedly satirical in his latest, and perhaps best, body of work to date. He is not the only artist in the show to note that the Utopian aspects of the United States are, to say the least, problematic, but the subject turns out to be peculiarly well suited to his brand of wild, eroticised imagery. Nor is he simply indulging in the popular pursuit of America-bashing. Rather his paintings push to extremes the fantasy worlds entailed by various forms of fundamentalist belief. The humour is broad, even crude, yet it works, and very well.

Geometry represents a kind of Utopian vision in itself, and it is to the fore in Paul Doran's extraordinary paintings, which feature in one of a number of substantial solo groupings. Several of the works evoke the spatial geometry of early Renaissance painting. Many painters are notably preoccupied by the question of space in painting, or of painting as offering a kind of space in itself. Both these issues clearly absorb Doran. The painters of the early renaissance were enthralled by their capacity to convey the appearance of geometric, architectonic spaces in two dimensions. They delighted in geometry.

Doran shares their delight. But he is aware that we can't just do the same thing over again, so his thickly painted, usually ragged-edged paintings offer complicated spatial composites. Expressly citing his artistic precursors, he depicts the serene geometry of architectonic spaces and structures, but only as fragments. We also have to deal with the physical block of the painting as an object, and as a notional surface, as something flat which can be embellished with bonbons of pigment. We're invited to deal with several layers of space simultaneously: the space in front of the painting, occupied by the bonbons, the painting as a surface, as an object, and the depicted space, all of them bound up in an inextricable bundle. It's challenging and exciting.

Declan O'Mahony addresses the question of space in a different but fascinating way, using acrylic polymers in translucent layers to build up stained glasslike compositions of great chromatic intensity. There is a fluent, easy quality to his use of form.

Éigse is particularly strong on painting. Apart from those already mentioned, Mark Swords has a really excellent small solo show, andLeda Scully, David Quinn, Kate Warner and Aidan Crotty are particularly good. And, boldly bringing art to the audience, Mairead O hEocha has instituted the Painting Library, whereby people can borrow paintings from Carlow Central Library. It's not Utopia, but surely it's a step in the right direction.

Éigse Carlow 2006: Utopias is at Carlow College, Carlow IT, Harcourt Place and other venues in Carlow until June 18 (059-9140491)