Quizzing the essence of objects

VISUAL ART

SUSAN TIGER IS an American artist, from Philadelphia, who has been living in rural north county Mayo since the end of the 1990s. The kind of expectations that concise history gives rise to are indicated in the title of a past show of her work at the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin: What's an American Artist Doing Not Making Paintings of Landscapes in Co Mayo?As indicated by her current show at the Ballina Arts Centre, The Shape of Things, she is still not painting landscapes as we generally think of them, though elements of the landscape, and the texture of life within it, are certainly to the fore in her concise works on paper.

In describing once how he set about composing a shot, filmmaker John Boorman put it very simply – and very well. You just make sure, he said, that every single thing you can see in the camera frame is there because you want it to be there. It sounds obvious enough, but in an era in which point and click imaging technology has never been better or more ubiquitous, it’s less and less true of the general flood of imagery that we encounter every day. Tiger’s approach could be seen as an extreme embodiment of Boorman’s principle.

She dispenses with extraneous elements in arriving at her images, editing out everything but the motif that interests her. In this she is aligned with a graphic tradition of selective, wry observation. Think the New Yorkercartoonists, for example. Her works though, while they are usually made on paper, vellum or watercolour paper, are not usually spare ink line drawings. For the most part they have a substantial physical presence, being made with a kind of patient deliberation, using acrylic paint and water-soluble graphite pencil, (as for example Held Bloom, pictured right).

Intense concentration on individual motifs has a strange effect. It's like quizzing their essence. They can become more intensely themselves – as in Gertrude Stein's " . . . a rose is a rose is a rose" – but also, and perhaps at the same time, be cut adrift from the context that makes them familiar. Like Stein's rose, Tiger's Teacher's appleis redder than red. Her Worn goneshoe heel is an unorthodox monument to the experiences of its wearer. The water between us, might be a flood pool on the road or an ocean, it's the between that is important.

While her works have a recognisable style and approach, each is usually self-contained in a neat, aphoristic way, though she does make small sequences and groups and, in one case, a series. The show is accompanied by an artist's book, a three-volume set, one of drawn images, one of "one-liners" or brief linguistic images, and one, Look How Beautiful the Rain Is, entirely given over to a series of drawings. Tiger made these latter images by standing out in the open catching patterns of blots made by falling rain. Then, back in the studio, she filled in the outlines of the drops with water-soluble graphite. They float like negative constellations on the paper, each drop a star or a galaxy. The rain is, as she says, beautiful.

THE TITLE MIGHT lead you to expect something of the arch contrivance of a Peter Greenaway film but The Cook, The Artist, The Wife, The Loverat Origin Gallery is a relatively straightforward two-person show. The two being landscape painter Neal Greig, and Eileen Ferguson, whose narrative works incorporate landscape but are primarily concerned with a sense of place, history and memory. Their work shares a preoccupation with the sea. Greig's is an upfront, out-there engagement with light and water and land, Ferguson's a meditative exploration of lives lived and meanings sought, often with the sea as a background.

She and Greig are partners, based in Co Monaghan. She is from Edinburgh, though has family links to Coney Island. Her grandfather was a lighthouse keeper and in a series of collage paintings she embeds documents and mementos in a painted, linear-patterned ground that symbolises the relentless cycle of the tides against the scale of human activity. Another body of work stems from the process of clearing and renovating a house in the Monaghan countryside, unearthing layers of the past, the mental worlds of the people who lived there brought to light in the trappings and textures of the place. Her observations are poignant and at times sharp, not at all cosily nostalgic, conveying the idea of time offering a sense of possibility but also loss.

Coney Island also features in Greig's paintings, along with Kerry, North Mayo and Newfoundland, where he spent a residency, often working outdoors. There's tremendous breadth and fluidity in his expansive view of a wet, flat shoreline in Mayo Headland. It's quite a big painting and he is well able for the large scale. With great virtuosity, he walks a tightrope between marks that are accurately naturalistic and marks that are almost offhandedly abstract. These casual-looking marks enhance the reality of the scene, providing an equivalent of the fresh immediacy of being there out in the open.

Greig comes from Belfast. From the first his work suggests a fascination with the sea, and an interest in striking that balance between gesture and faithful representation. The results can be terrific, for example the compact, close-up view Bolus Head, Ballinskelligs, which features rock, water and light, is a lovely painting, as is, equally, the very freely made Oliver's Cove, a study of curvaceous pink and orange tinged rocks against the blue mass of the sea in Newfoundland. It is a substantial show made up of two distinct, nicely complementary strands.

The Shape of Things, Ballina Arts Centre, Civic Offices, Arran Place, Ballina, Co Mayo Until March 27. The Cook, The Artist, The Wife, The Lover, Origin Gallery, 83 Harcourt St, Dublin Until April 4