Portraits of the artist as Alice in Real Life

Compact, Hillsboro Fine Art, 49 Parnell Sq W Until May 1 01-8788242 GULF, Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny Until June 6 056-7761106

WELSH ARTIST Shani Rhys James has big eyes and a broad, round head. In fact her features are similar to and as distinctive as the slightly cherubic Francis Bacon. We know this because, as in her work at Hillsboro Fine Art, she is her own most common subject. Those eyes stare boldly back at us again and again. On some occasions Rhys James seems to roll back the years and appear as a child, on others she is nude, reflected in a full-length mirror. Often, in tightly cropped compositions, her head fills the frame.

This level of self-absorption might sound positively narcissistic, but in fact the artist regards herself with a searching, unflattering intensity, as though she is at a distinct remove.

In a way, she is. The self she paints is a kind of alter ego who lives in the world of the paintings as in a fictional space, allowing her to reflect on every stage and aspect of life through the medium of her own experience and memories. One alter ego is Alice, an evocation of Lewis Carroll’s audacious heroine but who, in Rhys James’s paintings, does distinctly resemble the artist herself as a child.

She was born not in Wales but in Melbourne, Australia, to a Welsh father and an Australian mother, in 1953. She studied in Britain and has been based in rural Wales for the last 30 years or so, though of late she also regularly spends time in France. Over the years she’s won several awards and even garnered an MBE in 2006. She was a featured artist at Éigse in Carlow in 2000, and will feature in the forthcoming Éigse retrospective there this year. Rhys James’s usefulness as a subject, for herself and her audience, is that she offers a closely observed commentary on the minutiae and generalities of being alive, the business of charting a personal course. Collectively her pictures map out a domestic terrain with such emblematic sites and objects as the kitchen table, the bed, the bathroom and the baby’s pram. There’s a theatrical quality to the way she organises such props: and they are props, as in the case of the pram, which she found in a junk shop. She has also cited her parents’ involvement in theatre as an influence.

The artist’s image, as Alice, can feature directly in such scenes, regarding this landscape of domesticity with wary curiosity.

Occasionally there’s a note of sadness or loss but there’s also pleasure and delight in the abundance of, for example, a floral display, symbolic of natural richness. One of Rhys James’s teachers was the painter Gillian Ayres, who surely influenced her feeling for the physical substance of oil paint, and for colour. She handles paint really well, creating beautiful, freely worked surfaces. There’s nothing indulgent about her use of colour or pigment though, and a certain toughness of attitude comes through.

IN 2001, JACKIE NICKERSON visited the Sultanate of Oman on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. She took a series of photographs as she travelled in Oman but, for various reasons, she notes, put them to one side. Perhaps, and this is pure speculation, she did not want the work to be associated with events post-9/11 or regarded purely in the light of that historical moment. In the meantime, she completed and exhibited two substantial projects exploring two distinct kinds of communities in Ireland: enclosed religious communities in Faith, and her home townland in rural Co Louth in Ten Miles Round.

What those two bodies of work share is a concern for individuals considered in relation to particular environments, and how one shapes and interacts with the other: inner worlds and outer worlds. This holds true of GULF, her current exhibition at the Butler Gallery, as well. What we see are images of a landscape, and a people, caught in the space between tradition and modernity, the local and the global.

Her work is observational but it is not reportage. Rather she lights on details of the environment and the people that allow space for us to reflect on the nature of the place in a broad way, a way that equally invites consideration of our own society, our own environment.

Several of the photographs are printed on a very large scale.

Two, hung at right angles in a corner, are similar views of water towers. Like much else that we see in the 14 images that make up the show, there is an impassivity to the scenes: screens, walls, gates predominate. The glare and heat of the sunlight are palpable.

One tank is a minimal, silver block, like a piece of monumental modernist sculpture. The other is a tower perched on a platform of steel girders, an oblong embellished with a filigree pattern, a local flourish that is echoed in the details between the fence panels in the foreground.

An epic view of an arid, mountainous landscape shows how it has been sculpted to accommodate a sweeping motorway interchange. The lavishness of the infrastructure is all the more evident given the couple of tiny vans seen making their way along the vast, virtually empty stretches of highway. Equally a spindly, rudimentary goat shelter and water tank stand deserted in the heat of the day. Look closely, though, and the repeated imprint of four-by-four tyres on the ground puts a contemporary spin on the timeless practice of goat herding.

A veiled figure sits on a couch, her bare, hennaed arms cradling a bunch of imported lilies. Gradually a woman’s face becomes faintly visible behind the fabric entirely covering her head. A diminutive, flat-screen television monitor hangs high on the wall of the women’s room in a resplendent mosque. The technology obviates the need for the women to occupy the same space as the men, and the imam. Gradually we get a sense of the myriad complexities behind the apparent opacity.

Even the largest prints in the show are photographic prints in the traditional sense, shot on film and printed on photographic paper rather than via inkjet. It gives the works a curiously solid, material presence.