New fragments from the Spanish Armada

While there’s a sense of childhood in the work of Vanessa Donoso Lopez, there is also ‘scientific experimentation’ and a quietly disturbing hint of darkness

ALTHOUGH SHE was born and raised in Barcelona, Vanessa Donoso Lopez hadn't heard of the Spanish Armada until she'd been living in Ireland for some time. It hadn't featured in the history textbooks she'd studied and, interested, she began to read about it, eventually coming across Ken Douglas's authoritative account, The Downfall of the Spanish Armada in Ireland.

A saga of calamitous misjudgment, seriously bad luck, heroic endurance and frequent cruelty, the Armada generated its own rich lore in Ireland. There’s the popular myth, especially, about Spaniards settling in Ireland and giving an Iberian cast to the population of the Western Seaboard.

Alas, as Donoso Lopez says, Spaniards who made it to land were more likely to be robbed and killed than welcomed. But she is intrigued by the mythology as much as by the actuality and in an odd way, she says, her own experience parallels that of the hapless Armada.

"Like the Armada I set off with the idea of conquering England," as she puts it, "and ended up in Ireland by accident." Her exhibition, La gran y felicisima Armada( The great, very happy Armada), at Kevin Kavanagh, is a personal tribute to the secret, potential history of the Armada in Ireland, a speculation that many more Spaniards than is generally accepted may have integrated into Irish life. As she says: "No-one really knows."

Donoso Lopez has a highly distinctive artistic voice. She is an inveterate collector, but not, as she points out, because she is trying to assemble a collection of anything in particular as an end in itself. Rather, she collects masses of dolls, old china, toys, clocks and watches, little animal and human figurines, playing cards, patterned paper and much else. From this she creates pieces that incorporate multiple elements. While there’s a certain air of childhood playfulness and reassuring domesticity to her work, and she often domesticates the gallery spaces in which she exhibits, she also refers to her studio as a “scientific experimentation laboratory”, and there is a quietly disturbing darkness underlying much of her imagery.

She experiments with the various families of objects she acquires, altering, adapting and reconfiguring them, making fabulous hybrids, for example, such as a pack of two-headed dogs or a troupe of composite, animated dancing dolls. The objects she acquires beckon to her, she has to be drawn to them, but she only really makes them her own by altering them and, often, by what she calls “encapsulating” them: consigning them to the security of vitrines or bell jars, or making them the subjects of series of intricate coloured drawings.

In La gran y felicisima Armada she domesticates the Spanish Armada, imagining a series of cultural hybrids resulting from the Hiberno-Ibernian mix. Red hair is a prominent motif, a signifier of Irishness woven into elaborate coiffures that allude not only to the elaborate social rituals of the Spanish court but also the form of seafarers' knots – which they are. Another motif is the mongrel, brilliantly evoked in a series of tiny hybrid sculptures combining dog bodies and doll heads, all with intensely red hair. Appropriately, she names this new species Ibero-Ginger.

Her Storm in a Tea Cup, a tottering assemblage of china cups and saucers, again courtly in their formality, becomes, with some fragile additions, the Armada as a house of cards. Another evocation of the ships, Grande, feliz e invincible, is also pointedly precarious and delicate. The ships become scraps of aluminium fans, perched on twigs, subject to the turbulence generated by a modest little electric motor.

Donoso Lopez’s exhibition is shaped as one coherent installation and transforms the white cube space of the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery into a strange, hybridised realm of uneasy domesticity, a parlour stocked with semi-familiar but ambiguous, slightly unsettling objects and images. It’s worth paying it a visit, and making yourself at home. The work is involving and immediately gripping, and it only gradually reveals its layers and questions as you settle in and become accustomed to it.

La gran y felicisima Armadaby Vanessa Donoso Lopez,

Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Chancery Lane, Dublin. Until Saturday