Unleashing art in Portlaoise

Reviewed: Laois Arts Festival exhibitions

The Laois Arts Festival is centred around the county town where Richard Morrison, a student of Gandon, designed the courthouse, the distinguished Arts and Crafts stained-glass artist, AE Child, designed a window for the Protestant church, and where there is now a fine arts centre just off Main Street. On modest resources, the arts festival boasts a creditable visual arts programme. That programme was substantially devised by Kevin Kavanagh who, from Portlaoise, runs a gallery in Dublin. Many, though by no means all, of the artists represented at in festival exhibit or have exhibited with his gallery.

At the arts centre, Looking at Pictures is a particularly accessible group show. Rather than asking the artists for new work, Kavanagh requested previously exhibited pieces that he particularly liked.

Hence Dermot Seymour's small painting, in which a turkey plays a prominent role, is more narratively inclined than his recent studies of individual farm animals (one of which provides the festival's bovine mascot). If it's narrative you're after, there is plenty more on view, including Stephen Loughman's collection of sinister props in his Hitchcockian Still Life, and even Mark O'Kelly's vacant, anonymous urban interior, which invites us to inhabit its instantly recognisable space.

As See it as it is, the current show at Dra∅ocht, in Blanchardstown, Dublin, demonstrates, Kavanagh's gallery is home to a number of artists who practise varieties of edgy realism. This could be anything from Gary Coyle's heavily worked charcoal drawings taken from crime magazines to Colin Martin's closely observed scenes of family life or, for that matter, Margaret Corcoran's eclectically surreal juxtapositions of art historical imagery.

Other comparable participating artists are Geraldine O'Neill, David Quinn and Frank Carty, while other options are represented by, for example, Jay Roche's cool abstractions with their emphasis on process, Bongi MacDermott's brash, collage-based paintings and Michael Boran's consistently interesting photographs. It was interesting as well to see children's obviously engaged reactions to the work on view.

On Main Street is a sequence of works woven into the fabric of the town. It actually ventures off Main Street, beginning, for many visitors, with Susan McWilliam's peephole piece at the railway station, which plays on the notion of voyeuristic thrill-seeking with its depiction of a swooning heroine. Joyce Duffey's shop-window installation at Mad Mannequin ambitiously and entertainingly, if unevenly, tackles a brace of issues including food, couture, and the depiction of women in fine art.

Tracy Staunton's atmospheric installation presents us with the ghostly traces of past inhabitants in a musty abandoned house. At Graze, Stephen Delaney's pattern-paintings, inspired by insect markings, have a contemporary, graphic feel. Roisin Lewis, facing us from inside the window of Miscellany, transcribed what she listened to through her headphones into rhythmic, even handwriting on the far side of the glass. These are but four of 10 works making up a substantial show.

There were several other shows: Pauline Bewick at Heywood, work by prisoners from Portlaoise and Midlands Prison (selected by Mick O'Dea), Ray Murphy at County Hall, and Laois-based professional and amateur artists at Abbeyleix.

Cora Cummins' accomplished carborundum prints, in Landscape at the Laois Education Centre, are schematically clear and uncluttered. Their pale, muted colours and delicate lines economically convey invitingly empty spaces, and seem at home in the county's even, relatively subdued topography.

The largest single exhibition is sited some miles south-west of Portlaoise, at the Workhouse Museum at Donaghmore, the venue for a formidable collection of Mick O'Dea's Plastic Warriors. The title covers a disparate group of paintings and drawings made throughout the 1990s and never before displayed in such numbers or, for that matter, in so dramatic a setting. The museum is an extraordinary place, comprising one long block of a surprisingly large complex of grey stone buildings set in agreeable, rolling countryside. Inside, a chill in the air is accentuated by knowledge of the building's history, during the time when its unfortunate inhabitants subsisted, and often perished, in rudimentary conditions. The raised wooden platforms which provided the base for their straw bedding are still there.

O'Dea's hallmark is an informality of approach, and never more so than in this work, which is exceptionally sketchy and provisional, as though he wants to grab each idea on the wing and not linger long enough for it to become laboured or considered.

The underlying idea takes childhood games with toy soldiers as a means of visualising not only the intensity of childish feelings (as witness a concerted attack on a church congregation by assorted toy figures, a la Lindsay Anderson's schoolboy revolt in his film, If, but also the way childish preoccupations anticipate, even encapsulate adult concerns.

The godlike hands that reach down to manipulate the toy figures could be taken as commenting on real-world conflicts, particularly when the model soldiers depicted span the centuries. O'Dea also incorporates several specific references to Irish history. Besides this, though, much of the work could equally be read as referring to the conflicts of emotional life. It is, in all, a substantial show with a convincing rationale.

However, while he clearly likes capturing the spontaneity and volatility of youth, the roughness of handling and the work-in-progress quality of the vast majority of the pictures cumulatively tell against them.

The English painter, Malcolm Morley, revisiting the model (and real) aircraft battles of his early years, adopted something like an opposite approach, making the model planes, and the paintings, huge and hyper-real: as big and vivid as the imaginative world in childhood.

While most festival shows ended yesterday, Looking at Pictures, at the Dunamaise Centre, continues until November 10th.