Where everything can turn into its opposite

VISUAL ARTS:LAST YEAR Alice Maher made several animated "film-drawings" and exhibited them at the Green on Red Gallery. The Galway Arts Centre commissioned her to create a new one for the arts festival and it's on view, together with several existing animations and related sculptural works, in the artist's first solo show in Galway.

As with its precursors,

Godchildren of Enantios

presents us with a hypnotic succession of drawn images. Like them, as well, it’s a form of stop-motion animation that doesn’t set out to generate the illusion of movement: rather it’s a sequence of related, still images, each of which seems to magically transform into the next.

We're not talking Avatarhere in terms of digital technology. The technique is about as basic as it can be. There's no attempt to disguise the home-made, hand-made quality. In fact, as with William Kentridge's charcoal animations, a certain roughness is part of the point, with the residue of erased images building up conspicuously in the background, shadowy echoes of what was there. Trevor Knight provides a score which is more soundscape than music per se. It's very effective, contributes a lot in terms of atmosphere, and does much to generate a sense of forward momentum.

Drawing has been central to Maher’s work from the beginning and the labour-intensive drawing process involved in the method, with images photographed every 10 minutes, suits her down to the ground.

She doesn't set out to tell a story in a conventional sense, rather she improvises on the basis of a limited repertoire of motifs and devices. Enantiosis Greek for opposite or opponent, she notes, and her film is a visual riff on Carl Gustav Jung's theory that "everything eventually turns into its opposite." As ever, she delves into myth, folklore and fairytales, not illustrating any in particular but embracing an imaginative language which allows for poetic license, fantasy and symbolism.

People, animals, plants and inanimate objects interact in unpredictable, magical ways. The nature and meaning of any one thing is never fixed or pinned down; in fact, it’s inherently unstable, as human transforms into plant or animal and vice versa. As with fairytales, it’s a sometimes dark and violent world. People break into two, lose limbs and mutate bizarrely. Heads roll, and often multiply. Opposites clash and, as Maher says, merge.

So if we’re not looking at a story unfolding, what are we looking at? Well, she does have consistent motifs that fascinate or preoccupy her. Hair, for example, is one notable constant: sprouting and growing and enveloping, a wild, unstoppable force. And hair does feature in several popular fables and fairytales.

The cultural and religious management of women’s hair is a subject in itself, the suppression and concealment of hair saying much about attitudes to and treatment of women. If you look for a neat story in Maher’s animations you will be disappointed, but really you should allow yourself to go with the flow, to follow the illogicality of what is happening as though it is a dream. The unpredictability and ambiguities persuasively address the inner dramas of our emotional lives. Let the implications sink in gradually and you should be entertained and stimulated.

Godchildren of Enantios

Alice Maher. Galway Arts Centre, Runs until July 25

Elsewhere at Galway Arts Festival

BILL VIOLA'S combination of cutting-edge video technology with age-old spiritual questions has produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in contemporary art. He's been a hit in Galway before and this year's festival features a documentary portrait Territoria Do Invisiel as well as two fairly early pieces, Sodium Vapor(including Constellationand Oracle) from 1979 and Angel's Gate from 1989. The latter, a staccato succession of short sequences addressing "mortality, decay and disintegration", with one decisive exception, and Sodium Vapouris mainly an atmospheric look at Manhattan in the early hours – both brilliant.

Unable to paint after illness and serious surgery at the beginning of the 1940s, Henri Matisse didn't simply give up working. Instead of using paint and brushes, he turned to sheets of painted paper and scissors, materials with which he became adept. Working under his supervision, his Russian assistant Lydia Delectorskaya arranged the cut paper in several series of compositions. Some, like the Blue Nudes, are very spare and simple and some, like The Sorrow of the King, are quite complicated.

Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors at the Galway City Museum consists of 35 lithographs of the cut-outs. Because they are lithographs they lack the immediate, tactile quality of the originals, but Matisse’s gift for line, form, pattern and colour come through incredibly well and the show is a delight.

Ian McInerney of Black Maria has selected work by members of Engage Studios for an exhibition titled Enrageat the White Room Gallery. Maria Brennan's ProjectileMA Thesis is, sure enough, a blast of text splayed across a wall, and Aine Philips's Black Boardinvites comments from visitors. Jim Ricks, Eimearjean McCormack, Roisin O'Brien and Cecilia Danelle also stand out in a thoughtful, very well designed and installed show.

In the Kenny Gallery, Seoda 2010is a group show of sculpture, chosen by Colm Brennan and Leo Higgins and ranging from Patrick O'Reilly's Babel, a tower built from 5,000 cans, to several of Eileen McDonagh's elegantly sensual stone carvings, by way of bronzes by such artists as James McKenna, John Behan and Eamonn O'Doherty, plus fine pieces in stone and bronze by Cliodna Cussen. Lynne O'Loughlin's Virtual Eden is a very accomplished exploration of natural motifs that marries traditional print techniques with digital technology and Goldat the University Hospital is a thematic show that marks the Graphic Studio Dublin's 50th birthday in some style – or styles.