Creative surge into new territory

It is fairly rare that the components of an exhibition at IMMA would seem equally at home in the bedsit of a diehard Goth, but much of the work in Kiki Smith's mini-retrospective could sit comfortably among cast-iron candlesticks or Cure albumsleeves. Whether in her flayedlooking skins, her models of amputated limbs or her sculptures of internal organs, Smith has long displayed a facility for creating chic mementi mori.

There is plenty of that sort of work at IMMA. From Blood Pool, a red-stained human figure, its foetal posture doing little to protect its exterior spine, to another floorpiece, an untitled pile of human bones made from silver-covered plastic. (Smith is irresistibly attracted to the strategy of making over the commonplace, or the ghoulish, in precious materials.) Lately, however, Smith has turned her attention away from humans, in favour of the animal world. Smith's animals never quite inhabit a natural world. At times they seem distorted by some unwitnessed misuse, some pointless genetic fiddling (like the long-legged rabbit in Bunny); while at others they find themselves coopted as tools for thinking, containers for human ideas about the cosmos, as in the bestiary of glass creatures that marches down Kilmainham's west corridor.

Smith's work gives plenty of weight to the act of making, to the satisfactions of smoothlyfinished or richly distressed surfaces, to the creation of sparkle and shine. There are some odd exceptions, such as the junky, off-hand Black Bird, resting unsteadily on a roughcut plank painted in black lacquer. For the most part, however, the pleasures of Smith's works are straightforward, quasi-traditional. Her edginess, the faintest sense of catastrophe that marks the show, feels more like the spooky interlude in a Disney movie than anything inescapably nasty.

Runs until February 15th