Scully, stone and Synge

Artist Sean Scully's photographs of rugged Aran Island stone walls pay an uncanny homage to his blocky compositions , writes Aidan Dunne

In the cultural iconography of the emergent Free State, the soul of the country was located in the west of Ireland, and the soul of the west was located in the Aran Islands. The islands represented the heart of the heart of Irishness. Nowadays they also represent, as Sean Scully points out, the edge of the edge of Europe, a last rocky outpost before the vastness of the Atlantic. A couple of years back the curator Michael Dempsey, then working in the Galway Arts Centre, thought it would be a good idea to bring Scully and the Aran Islands together, for the purpose of his making a body of work, an exhibition, and a publication. Sean Scully: Walls of Aran, a photographic book with a text by Colm Tóibín, is one result of that idea.

It was in the middle of Scully's tenure as a professor of painting in Munich, and he thought it would be good for his students to decamp from the pampered centre of Europe to its weather-beaten periphery, "where they could look at the materials of the world without embellishment". To his considerable gratification, they agreed, some 30 of them, all bar one, in fact, who, for pressing personal reasons, could not travel. Scully's own text, which makes up an afterword, outlines his experiences of the trip in a very engaging, amusing and mildly self-deprecating manner, but of course the substance of his contribution is a series of black-and-white photographs of the walls, buildings and fields of what is described in James Joyce's story The Dead, Tóibín notes, as "the strangest place in the world".

Strung out across Galway Bay, the three Aran Islands are a continuation of Co Clare by other, watery means, an extension of its limestone terraces. The only signs of the granite of nearby Co Galway are the glacial erratics deposited, as if by magic, throughout the landscape and, too tough to break and use, left standing like monuments. Loose stone that liberally carpeted the bedrock was gathered to form networks of dry stone walls, unlikely lattices that calm the incessant winds, and allow for the retention of a soil substantially composed of sand and seaweed. The hardy people who effected and sustained all this have been understandably mythologised: "All born aristocrats," as Liam O'Flaherty, himself an Aran Islander, characterised them.

Tóibín's text recalls several of his own visits to the islands, including one trip to Inis Meáin to see Druid perform John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea, for an audience of islanders. Synge is an inescapable and indispensable presence in any account of the islands, and there are other vital mediators, including O'Flaherty's nephew, Brendán Ó hEithir, and, latterly, Tim Robinson. But lest we assign the islands too readily to the domain of cultural history and present-day tourism, Tóibín begins with a reminder that out there the elements still hold sway, as his planned flight to Inis Meáin is thwarted by the weather and he must endure, instead, a rough sea crossing, in a boat "not moving through the waves as much as lunging against them". There are an estimated 1,500 kilometres of drystone walls on the islands and, as Scully observes, he is far from the first person to wonder at them, and to photograph them. But, like the man who reads Shakespeare and is surprised to find that it's full of quotations, look at this book and you may be taken aback to discover that the Aran Islands are liberally populated with Sean Scully compositions. Often the correspondences between sections of rugged stone wall and his blocky compositions are uncanny, not just in a simple, linear sense but in terms of feeling. A grammar of minimal means, improvisation under pressure, sound construction and subsequent resilience applies in different ways to both walls and paintings.

As an artist who is sparing with colour, he is responsive to the "grey on green, field after field after field." In being there, in negotiating his way through these "austere and elemental" sculptures, Scully recognises something. The walls are functional, but also right - "each stone where it should be" - and beautiful. "I nominate them as art," he writes, "because of their unremitting, austere, repetitive variety." His photographs are suitably respectful, straight-on documentary.

The book is self-contained and pleasing as a piece of work in itself. It sticks to the point. Published by Thames & Hudson, it was produced by Steidl, which has an unparalleled record for putting together such visual essays. It may seem odd that the few Scully paintings reproduced occupy only a few pages and are very small in scale. But, in fact, that is entirely appropriate. Referring to them, we can see the clear links between the paintings and the photographs, but equally Scully the painter stands aside, directing our attention to these "monumental but egoless" works.

• Sean Scully: Walls of Aran, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín, is published by Thames & Hudson

• Sean Scully, Walls of Aran continues at the Kerlin Gallery, Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2, until Sat, June 2