Grounded in the landscape

Visual Arts/Aidan Dunne: The paintings and drawings in Bernadette Kiely's Slow Time - Local Ground concern themselves with just that: the ground, carefully and meditatively considered.

The exhibition's current venue is the final stage of a journey that began last April at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, in Sligo. That was, as it happens, close to the source of the paintings, which were triggered by visits to Ballinglen Arts Foundation, in Ballycastle.

The north Co Mayo landscape, exceptionally uncompromising and dramatic, elicits different responses from different visitors to Ballycastle. Made over several years, during intermittent stays, and, subsequently, in the studio, Kiely's work for the most part draws our eyes away from the vast expanses of mountainside and ocean that dominate. The distant horizon and the heavy weight of bogland are overwhelming. When the weather closes in there is an edge-of-the-world feeling to the landscape.

It is as if Kiely looks downwards, into the grain of the ground itself. She is struck by the extremity of the environment, the curiously absolute quality of everything. In an interview with Suzanne Woods she notes "the blackness of the bog, the silvery . . . sea and sky . . . the stark contrasts between light and shadow . . . the bleakness and loneliness". In this arena of heightened contrasts there is also heightened awareness - of time, changes in light, changes in vegetation.

Rather than make representational images of the landscape, fitting it into a conventional format, she tries to grasp the essence of place, a sense of rootedness to a spot, and the essence of change that comes with Slow Time. Hence we have impossibly black, dense evocations of heavy wet peat, waterlogged ground and muddied pools.

Equally, we have brilliant bursts of white and acidic yellow with the advent of bog cotton and flowering gorse.

These seasonal events gain an intensity and significance way beyond the ordinary, enhanced by the awareness fostered by the conditions of the place itself. They also come to stand for more in the paintings, for a kind of essential, core vitality, a sense of life itself, burning brightly, underscored by darkness. This is so as well in the way that fragments of landscape are fringed with luminous edges of dawning or fading light. The several groups of work that make up Slow Time are bold, texturally adventurous paintings of great quality.

Although the work of Sonja Landweer is very different from that of Rudolf Heltzel, they make a very effective partnership in their two-person show. It's not too much of an overstatement to say that both are living legends of Irish design. The involvement of both with Ireland extends back to the establishment of Kilkenny Design Workshops in the 1960s. Heltzel headed the silver and jewellery department before going out on his own. Landweer's primary involvement was at first in ceramics, but, as is evident from this show, her work tends to transcend boundaries.

Jewellery seems an inadequate or inaccurate term for what she has variously termed body sculptures and adornments. Certainly, one of the striking aspects is the lively, sometimes combative relationship between many of her adornments and the body. It is doing no more than stating the obvious to say that jewellery belongs on the body, but her pieces are different in that they engage in spiky, provocative conversations with the wearer. Hence the strong sense of an absent subject when you see them detached in the gallery.

The affinity of her work to tribal ornament surely relates to this immediate physical engagement.

There is a straightforward contrast between Heltzel's angular precision in his incredibly detailed pieces and her inclination towards open-ended, organic forms in pieces that are equally precise and detailed, to a different end. She uses conventional and perhaps more unconventional materials, including clay, stones, bone, paper, feathers, felt, rubber and filament. Although what she makes is for the most part very labour-intensive, often it is as if she doesn't want so much to master the materials as intervene to a degree that unleashes their inherent energies. Something like this is directly visualised in the way one material will burst out from another or the way a piece will concentrate in a simple knot. Very simply, using myriad crimps on masses of lengths of filament, she makes a necklace. To wear it would be like having a ring of atoms writ large, buzzing and spinning around your neck.

Apart altogether from his proven record, Heltzel's work would quickly convince you that he is a craftsman and artist of extraordinary solidity and competence. He shows a group of paired pieces: relatively simple rings and more complex, even contemporary baroque, pendants. Gold frames a variety of stones in both. The rings are "relatively" simple because simple is not quite the word, but their square-cut forms consciously complement the structural exuberance of the pendants.

Heltzel uses a great variety of stones in a variety of finishes. The pendants are fully fledged compositions, their arrangements sometimes recalling art-deco modernism. There is a recurrent play on symmetry maintained or offset, and a strong sense of a central focal point. In a way their remarkable quality is only fully apparent under magnification. The larger-than-life illustrations in the exhibition catalogue display the ingenuity and feeling that have gone into each piece.

Inevitably, in shows like this, the art-craft debate comes up as an issue. With work of the quality of that by Landweer and Heltzel, it ceases to matter.

Reviewed

Bernadette Kiely: Slow Time - Local Ground Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle, until January 23rd (056-7761106)

Rudolf Heltzel and Sonja Landweer National Craft Gallery, Castle Yard, Kilkenny, until January 30th (056-7761804)