Moving from darkness into light

VISUAL ART:KATHY PRENDERGAST occupies a special place in contemporary Irish art. Even at the time of her graduation show, in 1980, it was clear she was an artist with a distinctive imaginative vision and a wide range of abilities. She later remarked she was grateful to the tutors in the NCAD for having left her alone. Her work emerged from spells of meditative reflection, with little in the way of tangible results for a long time: not a process, in other words, that would be encouraged in today's highly structured art education system.

It was, though, clearly what she needed, and the proof is that she has continued to work in exactly that way, at her own pace and according to her own, inner imperatives, apparently showing scant regard for career management and self-advancement in the art world. Yet despite its generally quiet, even introverted character, the exceptional quality of her work has ensured she has advanced and her reputation has grown. She was named the best young artist at the Venice Biennale in 1995, for example, and has exhibited widely internationally.

With its dark tone and a palette dominated by black, white and grey, the work in her new show at the Kerlin Gallery does not exactly set out to win the viewer over with its razzmatazz. Even the title, the grey before dawn (PART 2)strikes a distinctly downbeat note. Take the trouble to engage with the work, though, and the chances are that not only will it win you over, you'll find that while it addresses themes relating to mortality and transience, it is ultimately optimistic and affirmative rather than downbeat.

Right from the beginning Prendergast has been interested in individual experience in a global context. That is, how we, as individuals grow into, make our way through, and strive to understand the world. We do so in the light of networks of links and ties: family, affiliates, communities, historical and geographical groupings. Her vast series The City Drawings, which is in IMMA’s collection, is a compendium of drawings in which, though based on maps, cities are treated as organic entities, fragile and alive. Maps, and the way life in itself generates meaning, have been consistent strands running through her various projects.

Maps are at the heart of her Kerlin show, and they form part of another on-going series. She has taken maps of European countries and methodically inked in the open spaces so that myriad cities, towns and villages form constellations, pinpoints of stellar light against a textured blackness. It’s as though each pinpoint is a living community symbolically set against the vast darkness of space. More, there is a sense of community, and life itself, as a tenuous flowering, that is reinforced in the other works in the show.

These include a series of beautiful sculptural works that follow another consistent line of approach on Prendergast’s part. That is to see in the everyday and the domestic a cosmic pattern of life and death. The constituent fibres of a hearthrug with a decorative floral pattern are unpicked so that the plants assume three-dimensional form and blossom against a network of foliage. A wall-mounted piece, which links a series of flower heads together via their interlinked stems, is another way of illustrating a family tree, a personal history with its connected flowerings of life.

These are night-time thoughts and feelings, coalescing out of the greyness of the pre-dawn. There is an elegiac recognition of transience and loss built into this vision of things, but in the patterns of links picked out over vast expanses of space and time, there is also a compensatory, reassuring intimation of life’s brilliance and continuity. As ever, the patient exactitude of Prendergast’s method continues to inform everything she does.

IN BAD!at the Rubicon Gallery Laurina Paperina satirises the art world in the form of the signature styles and images of many of the better known artists. She does so most cruelly in her group of videos How to Kill the Artists – the fifth installment, apparently, of the series. Here, David Hockney dives into an empty swimming pool and Jackson Pollock self-destructs to make an "action painting". Paperina's own signature style is a form of deadpan cartooning involving pared down caricatures. To her credit she picks on a broad range of targets, not sparing such luminaries as Tracy Emin, Matthew Barney or fellow scribbler David Shrigley. If you follow modern and contemporary art, chances are you'll be amused.

ANNE MADDEN'S EXHIBITIONhas just ended its run at the Taylor Galleries – though some of the work can still be viewed there. It was made up of three groups of pieces: two of sets of paintings inspired by the aurora borealis, smaller ones on paper and larger, multi-panel compositions, plus a series of pastels of leaves. Their nominal subject matter notwithstanding, the larger paintings have a stellar intensity, as though they are description of the surface of the sun rather than the earth.

With their dominant elemental patterns, perhaps more clearly indicated in the small works on paper, in which boldly stated pattern is to the fore, they set up hazy, energised colour fields that have an hypnotic and, in filmic terms, slow-motion quality. Actually they are constituted of pattern on every level: besides the big arcs and curves, their surfaces are built from myriad repeat patterns of imprinted colour marks, a device which contributes greatly to their atmospheric effects.

Rather starker are the series of leaves. Although they are rendered as sensuous, curvilinear forms, they are fragmentary and there is a starkness to them that makes them look wintry and relatively desolate by comparison with the eruptions of radiant colour in the aurora paintings.

The grey before dawn (PART 2) at Kerlin Gallery, Anne’s Lane Dublin until Nov 21; Bad!, Rubicon Gallery, St Stephen’s Green until Nov 7; Anne Madden, Paintings Pastels at Taylor Galleries, Kildare St, Dublin