A painter, sculptor and draughtswoman who evades definition

WITH ITS spare elegance and restraint, Aleana Egan’s work at the Temple Bar Gallery is a perfect antidote to the excesses of the recent holiday season. Her show is called Sunday Night, and it consists of a series of physically minimal, often linear sculptures. Well, they are sculptures, but a catalogue note on the show accurately observes that the work defies neat categorisation, falling “somewhere between sculpture, drawing and painting”.

The pieces could be described as three-dimensional drawings, and several of them are distinctly painterly, not just because they happen to incorporate paint but because of Egan’s use of decorating filler to create surface textures.

In fact a list of her ingredients – including tape, cardboard, varnish, tile adhesive, glue and nails – marks her down as a sterling customer of DIY shops. And there is a casual, home-assembly feel to some of her work.

Having evaded definition as sculptor, painter or draughtswoman, she slips between the bars of abstraction and representation. While she very fluently uses much of the language of abstraction, she avoids the kind of formal neatness that might identify her too closely with it, opting for an openness and unpredictability, even an idiosyncratic flexibility, in terms of form and fabric. She also grounds her work in its physical, architectonic settings and alludes to imaginative, narrative contexts, again while leaving every question open.

She is a young artist from Dún Laoghaire – she’s currently showing an installation in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum there – who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. She spends time in Berlin and Dublin, and has already shown widely internationally. While what’s on view in Dublin at the moment is consistent in appearance and substance, her record suggests that she has ranged far and wide in terms of media and technique, exhibiting photographs, videos, collages and mixed-media installations, as well as sculptural pieces.

She titles her works, alluding to architectural details and using fragments of sentences from literary sources. Does that imply an illustrative or novelistic intent? It would seem not, because she uses such references in an oblique, elliptical way, as though she wants to evoke the whole richness of a worldly context without committing herself to a specific narrative or image. The explanatory notes tells us that the work doesn’t have a conventional thematic content, but is made “in relation to occurrences of experiences imbued with personal significance for the artist”. From our point of view the significance, and the experiences, remain personal to her, though we can still appreciate many aspects of her work.

Presumably incorporated in what we see are her own introspective, imaginative reworkings, or imaginative recollections, but one would be hard-pressed to disentangle anecdotal or narrative imagery. Rather there’s a nice formal flourish to each piece that draws us in. She has a preference for looping, enfolding forms that seem to encompass and, more, to define spaces with sensitive regard to the architectural character of the setting. To judge by what is installed in Temple Bar, she is really adept at outlining and energising a space within a given set of constraints. There’s a lovely, easy-going quality to the way the pieces not just inhabit but engage with the gallery and establish their own sense of possibility.

Sara Lowndes, writing about Egan’s work previously, described it appositely as occupying a space between “open-ended abstraction” and “emphatically intimate expression”. And as the show’s curator, Padraic E Moore notes, one significant, recurrent feature is a precarious, fragile feeling. Sometimes it’s as if the pieces have been formed by chance and are just momentarily arranged. But a casual aesthetic is held in check, prevented from becoming just too casual, by an underlying formal discipline.

Understudy, for example, is fashioned from mild steel and so its form is carefully considered and fixed, but it also looks as if it might overbalance at any moment. That tension attracts the eye and makes the piece. There's a delicacy to Egan's vision, but also a stubborn insistence, and that's true of her show overall. Give it a chance, and a bit of time, and you should find it both quietly unassuming and quietly rewarding.

CORBAN WALKERhas made an installation at the Hugh Lane Gallery as part of the Golden Bough series of exhibitions. It's called Mapping the Hugh Lane, and it takes the form of an architectonic sculptural intervention. Generally his work addresses perceptions of scale and accessibility, strength and vulnerability. In Charlemont House he's taken on one of the ground-floor side galleries, a distinctive lozenge-shaped room. One of the features of the room is a pair of elaborately panelled wooden seats, constructions that also house radiators.

Around these imposing though usually unremarked structures, Walker has designed walls of dark blue, dimly transparent Perspex, scaled so that visitors can make their way, just about, between the Perspex and the gallery walls. The habitual way we would encounter the room has been redefined. The two monolithic Perspex boxes are physically imposing, pushing us against the walls from which we’d normally stand back. They also prompt us to look at what we’d normally look away from (and towards the walls), that is, the wooden seats now sealed up within.

These structures now appear to be the focus of the room, and, although it may well not be part of his intention, they resemble tombs sealed up in their big twilit boxes. It is all fairly simple, but it’s really effective. It’s a good installation, one that does prompt us into reconsidering our relationship to the gallery space, essentially by thwarting our expectations.

Sunday Night Works by Aleana Egan. Temple Bar Gallery until Jan 16. Corban Walker: Mapping Hugh Lane – a site-specific installation as part of the Golden Bough series. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane until Jan 16