It is a crude simplification to say that Irish visual art performed a disappearing trick between the age of the Celts and post-independence Ireland. As art historians have laboured to make clear, the situation was much more complicated, but there is a degree of truth to it. Prior to the period immediately preceding independence, Irish artists of real stature certainly emerged, but any role they played in the formation or expression of cultural identity was overshadowed or entirely eclipsed by the fact of British domination. Even artists who identified emotionally with Ireland had to cope with the practical reality that the centre of cultural gravity, and any hope of an artistic career, lay in London.
So, with relatively few exceptions, it was usually to London they went, and to London they returned after the requisite pilgrimage to Italy. From the late 19th century, while international modernism held sway, there was a tacit acceptance of the notion of a dominant cultural centre which disseminates a dominant style, and Ireland was on the periphery.
In theory, as modernism shaded into postmodernism, we witnessed the dispersal of authority from the centre to the periphery. Like everyone else, artists travel much more these days, and that and other channels of communication combine to shrink distances. In practice, though, this hasn't led to quite the brave new global village that we might expect. There are still centres and peripheries, still stylistic orthodoxies.
After all, London experienced a latterday renaissance as an artistic centre not that long ago, perhaps confirming the economic and cultural reasons that have contributed to the persistence of its appeal to Irish artists.
0044 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, is a survey of the work of 20 contemporary Irish artists, from North and South, based in Britain. In the case of artists from the North, where education and career structures are relatively integrated with those in Britain, going on to study and work in Britain is a natural progression. However, it is striking that, while to some extent artists from the North are dispersed throughout the UK, most of them, and practically all of the artists from the South, are based in London, where many of them have done very well, if not quite making it into the mainstream Young British Artists' league.
0044 is, appropriately enough, an exhibition organised by the Crawford Gallery-in-exile. Originally, the idea was that 0044, which has already toured in the US, would inaugurate the new gallery spaces in Cork in time for the new millennium. When that didn't work out, the Ormeau Baths stepped into the breach.
On the face of it, a show of work by Irish artists in Britain runs the risk of encouraging and reinforcing cultural stereotypes, as pretty much all the artists are well aware. It is no surprise to find that what we see in 0044 is fairly international in tenor (just consider Nicholas May's extraordinary painting), and it is also, in many cases, intensely personal.
As Paul Seawright jokes: "Your nationality depends on who's giving you the grant." His own path, from making work that addresses Northern Ireland - including the work in this show - to less geographically specific concerns is not untypical and might be described as a wariness of received identity. It's arguable that he has yet to equal the cogent force of his Northern work, but the irony here is that he only made work about Northern Ireland once he had moved out of it. He is not unique in finding that distance affords him a suitable perspective from which to view home truths. As sculptor John Gibbons puts it: "For me, being in Ireland is like being in the fire." Daphne Wright points out how, when she studied in England, identity was presented as an issue to be addressed by non-British students: "The white British students get on with their art, the other students get on with the problem."
Frances Hegarty, who was born in Teelin in Co Donegal but has spent most of her life in England, is one artist who, judging by her work, is actually quite haunted by the sense of displaced identity that stems from knowing Ireland as a country you leave, and knowing that there is no going back. Hence there is a continual, obsessive questioning of herself in her video installations, a constant, anxious desire to find out who she is. Displacement also surfaces in Liadin Cooke's 21 Balls of Clay.
In a process that recalls fossilisation, the material referred to, the clay, has been replaced by cast aluminium. The balls are spread across the gallery floor as if they are part of some game, but they are incredibly evocative of an elsewhere recalled without nostalgia but with disturbing sensual precision.
A concern with a more general placelessness, or rootlessness, is evident in Elizabeth Magill's cut-and-paste landscapes, which exude a sense of melancholy with their brooding quality of romanticism revisited, or in Siobhan Hapaska's half-familiar, half completely strange acrylic (and usually quite ugly) objects, that look "as if they had just arrived from somewhere". Kathy Prendergast's map pieces, drawings of lakes which are unnamed, and a digitally manipulated map of the United States in which all features are renamed Lost, challenge our assumptions of knowing where we are, while Daphne Wright's dreamscape of silver peaks is like a point-of-death, exoticised evocation of a remembered landscape. The prone body, draped with cloth, in Mo White's video also suggests death but, in a startling juxtaposition, the background is filled with huge close-up images of a live body probing its own flesh. With a slightly more focused construction, this could be a brilliant piece of work.
It is not the only instance of bodies looming large. Cecily Brennan's sculptures are immediately impressive, not least because they are such startling objects. Glistening evocations of flesh in a thoroughly unfleshy medium, stainless steel, they are truncated limbs, like samples from the anatomy room. Grisly stuff, and, grislier still, they are roughly gashed and crudely repaired, their horrible wounds still evident. The combination of elements is very effective: the hard, impassive material suggesting both toughness and shocking vulnerability. Metaphors for damage and damage limitation, they are disturbing, but legitimately so.
Three generations of human hair - grandmother, mother, child - make up the yarn wound around the spool in Kathy Prendergast's The End of the Beginning II.
John Gibbons takes the idiom of abstract steel construction and humanises it, creating resonant images of containment and loss. Andre Stitt's Beuys-like reliquary shelves are stocked with the stained, battered souvenirs of various performances, redolent of bodily contact and involvement.
Mark Francis paints the microscopic landscape of the body, the expanses within which unseen microbiological processes proceed. The fragility and structural complexity of the respiratory process informs Maud Cotter's Air, a wall of stacked corrugated cardboard in cross-section, a ghostly presence that is best seen against the light.
0044 is at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast until March 11th
