Forging links with the natural world

Alan Counihan's work is often powerful, but is it in the right place, asks GEMMA TIPTON

OF ALL the things that make art strange, surely the most powerful must be the gallery itself. The oppressive presence of white walls, and the hushed tones with which one feels compelled to speak, alienate visitors from themselves.

I first came across Alan Counihan's work in the wonderful Sculpture in the Parklandsat Lough Boora. There, in an area of cutaway bog now given over to pieces of site-specific sculpture and land art, Counihan had placed a cut into the cut of the bog.

In Elementalat the Butler Gallery, Counihan is working on a smaller scale, and dealing with the shift in context, from the world into the removed atmosphere of the gallery. Working almost exclusively in Kilkenny marble and limestone, the first remarkable thing about the exhibition is the sheer presence a lump of rock has in the civilised gallery environs. It is the same strangeness that Walter de Maria's New York Earth Roomevokes. There is nothing so odd, or even beguiling, about earth, but a room of it, on the first floor of a building in downtown Manhattan may make you feel differently about the world, and your own place in it.

Origin, a beautiful square of marble, is marked with a cosmic explosion of what could be tiny atoms, stars, or even something as delicate and ephemeral as pollen. It is a small and powerful piece, and leads the way into what is essentially an exploration of the sculptural and emotional potential of stone. Less successful are Longingand Fossil, which seem to attempt to expose the intervention of man on nature, with marks of sledgehammer and drill. Instead of a sense of something revealed, or even a tension between the rough and worked edges, the idea feels still trapped in there, lurking somewhere beneath the surfaces.

Bridgeand Ground of Being,on the other hand, are masterpieces of tension and skill. Bridgesees two marble slabs forever separated, or else held together, by a piece of white polished bone, as light, both in the sense of colour and weight, holds darkness and heaviness in the balance; while the deadness of dried bone makes the rock appear to be something yet living. A similar play is there in Ground of Beingas a pendulum, suspended at the end of two more marble slabs, encourages you to consider more closely the cut and worked planes of stone.

The final part of the exhibition sees Counihan further explore man's relationship to the environment. He has said that his interest lies "in the human need to imbue landscape with meaning on both an individual and communal level", but Overlayand Kilcashare almost too literal in the way the marks of mapping on stone ( Overlay) and the hanging chains on wood ( Kilcash) describe a violation of the natural world. And yet I imagine each outside the gallery, perhaps in the context of Lough Boora, and it seems that context is everything: elsewhere Kilcashmay sing.

Until March 6th