All eyes on the screen as art's evolution is televised

Video-based works spread over various venues provide an arresting focal point of the visual arts strand in Kilkenny this year, writes AIDAN DUNNE

AS IT works out, the visual arts strand of this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival is dominated by screen-based work. The centrepiece show, At the Still Point, is spread over five venues and features “Irish women artists working in film”. In parallel with the festival, the Butler Gallery features a major show of video works by the renowned Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. Add it all up and that’s a lot of screen time, though served up in equable portions, given that the longest single piece is de Beeck’s Sea of Tranquility at 30 minutes or so.

Previously screened during Dublin Contemporary, Sea of Tranquility is a visual tour-de-force. Conceived when de Beeck was on a residency in Saint-Nazaire in France, it was inspired by the city’s history of building huge luxury cruise liners. In glacially slow-moving dramatic vignettes, de Beeck imagines his own liner, cruising with a complement of pampered, narcissistic passengers. There’s an empty, sterile quality to the characters and the ship they inhabit that is slightly off-putting – deliberately so, because it’s an allegorical vessel and de Beeck is dissecting nihilistic consumerist culture.

Incidentally, he also composed the laid-back lounge-jazz number for the film, and the other three works that make up his show demonstrate the startling range of his talents. They are all videos but they incorporate drawing, painting and sculpture in ingenious ways. In a beautifully designed piece of installation, the Butler has been remodelled into four separate screening rooms.

With At the Still Point the curator, Josephine Kelliher of the Rubicon Gallery in Dublin, was aiming not for a systematic survey but for a certain grittiness, a sense of artists going against the grain of their own previous work or of the generic conventions of film and video. To see the constituent parts of the exhibition is to make an intriguing tour of some of Kilkenny’s historic sites, some obvious – Rothe House, for example – and some not obvious at all, such as the Bishop’s Robing Room on Church Lane or the Monument Room at St Mary’s Hall.

Location is crucial in the case of Áine Phillips and Vivienne Dick’s Redress in the Robing Room, inspired as it is by cases of institutional abuse in Ireland, especially the Magdalene Laundries. Projected onto veils of translucent fabric in the atmospheric space of the run-down robing room, where bishops garbed themselves with ceremonial finery, we see images of a woman struggling with a voluminous but oddly misshapen garment, variously revealing and clothing her body.

The constraint and awkwardness of her situation, the sensuality of white fabric and exposed flesh, and the ghostly nature of the floating images in the clerical setting all amount to an exceptional incarnation of a work that has previously been shown in other contexts. The dress is adapted from one that appears in a series of photographs in Eadweard Muybridge’s classic The Human Figure in Motion, as is the idea of rhythmically repeated action.

In Rothe House, Niamh O’Malley’s Island also nods to ritual repetition. Shot in lustrous black-and-white on the pilgrim island of Lough Derg, it’s a powerful work consisting of a series of slow, stately pans punctuated by intervals of inky blackness across wintry, empty expanses of lapping water, quayside and shoreline. There are no pilgrims, and no conspicuous signs of religiosity, but a spare, pared-down concentration on the bones of the place and the circularity of ritual.

Tracy Hanna and Deborah Smith’s pieces are clever, tactful interventions in the monument room of St Mary’s Hall, enhancing and elaborating on the distinctive atmosphere of the place. Anita Groener’s graphic animation Somewhere Else brilliantly visualises the common experience of separation and distance, and the compromised, uncertain nature of communication. Aideen Barry’s nightmarish account of a woman’s suburban domestic imprisonment is artfully sited in the Victorian Tea House. Cecily Brennan’s bleak slapstick film, recalling Buster Keaton and Beckett alike, is in Rothe house. Jesse Jones’s The Predicament of Man rehearses the device of the cinematic flashback against a stark, post-industrial setting.

There are painting and craft shows in Kilkenny (see Patrick O’Connor at the County Council offices and Utensil at the National Craft Gallery) but there’s a notable division of responsibility given the wealth of painting- and craft-oriented shows in nearby Thomastown.

Start with Grennan Mill Craft School, overseen by Alexandra Meldrum, which is a delight to visit. Make your way upwards through a succession of shows to the top-floor pairing of John Bentley and Andi McGarry. They share Northumbrian roots and are lifelong friends, though this is apparently the first time they’ve shown together. It’s a veritable cornucopia. There’s a fantastic, unstinting generosity to their displays of paintings, drawings, objects and books – both are well known as book-makers.

Stephanie Brown sums up their respective approaches and temperaments well. In his narratively dense work Bentley, tending towards the monochromatic, describes a “mythical metropolis” inhabited by a teeming population of sharply drawn, richly detailed characters. McGarry, on the other hand, takes “a different, more elemental route, a watery domain of sea, rain, islands, bobbing coracles, flowing colour”. His paintings of figures, “wraiths”, against the shifting, edgy light of the sea, are particularly outstanding.

Lorraine Lamothe’s Weevil Rugs of New Guinea are exactly that, miniature hand-tufted rugs taking their patterns from insect anatomy. Canadian by birth, Lamothe is based in Northern Australia and has spent much time in Papua New Guinea. Her use of colour, pattern and form is impeccably well judged in concentrated works that refer to local mat-making traditions in New Guinea and Canada.

Ruairí Carroll’s carved stone figures, Jackie Sheehan’s explorations of colour, Doirin Saurus’s engaging variations on a teapot and Fiona Heaney’s flowers and birds, intricately fashioned from fine wire, complete the Mill’s impressive compendium of shows.

There’s much more in Thomastown and nearby. It’s essential to mention Bridget Flannery’s paintings at the Berkeley Gallery, Bernadette Kiely’s nuanced paintings and charcoal drawings in The River, appositely located overlooking the Nore on the Mount Juliet Estate, Bernadette Madden at Jerpoint Glass, exquisite photographic work by Gwen Wilkinson and closely observed landscapes by Annabel Konig at the Framewell Gallery, which they share with the 2012 Ceramics Ireland international Festival Exhibition.

All of which by no means exhausts what’s on offer.

[ kilkennyarts.ie ]