VISUAL ART:IS IT INEVITABLE that each department will put its stamp on the work of its graduates at the NCAD? The obvious answer is yes, of course.
Students pursue the discipline they’re drawn to, and each department has an identity and an ethos that is distinctive. At the same time, the practice of art has never been more open, and the traditional links between a nominal art form and the media it employs have never been as tenuous. Someone studying, say, print, can eschew all contact with etching, lithography and screen-printing, and opt to work in video, or photography, or almost anything. And the same holds for all the departments.
As it happens, in this year’s NCAD graduate show there are many traditional printmakers in the Print department. Sculpture students, on the other hand, have long moved beyond the traditional definition of the term and into other means, such as dressing up in a monochromatic costume, complete with balloon head, like a cartoon character, and documenting the responses of the populace when you appear. Amanda Durkan did just that, as you can see in the exhibition. As a piece of work, hers echoes and references Gillian Wearing, particularly a piece in which Wearing wandered the streets with her head entirely swathed in bandages. But Durkan still manages something good in her own right.
It’s possible to give a general, and informative, rundown on each department at the NCAD this year, but there are no strictly defined boundaries. It’s interesting to note that there’s a lot of painting going on in Painting, for example, which hasn’t always been the case in the recent past, as painters rushed to embrace “new” media. Now those media – usually entailing digital video and aspects of computer technology – are catered for by their own department, and the colleges reflect a renewed interest in painting in the wider art world.
As in that world, most of the painting on view at NCAD is small in scale, and attentive to its position in relation to the vast expanse of art history and the pop cultural dominance of digital imaging technologies. Several painters are outstanding. They include Cristina Bunello, whose exceptional technical facility is married to a focused sensibility. Her studies of young girls, in paint and video, have an uncanny quality. Where Bunello refers continually to photography, Natasha Conway refers to art history. Her richly textured, subtly coloured compositions are constructed with a lightness of touch, but are as solidly built as block walls, echoing Morandi, Cubism, and Classicism.
Sam Keogh uses “found or cheap materials” to evoke highly prized ones, in two and three-dimensional pieces. Part of their appeal is that you could almost walk by them without registering the ingenuity that has gone into their construction. David Maher’s dandyish, perfectly judged works on paper are counterpointed by a sculptural arrangement of sprouting potatoes and sewn cloth. Sarah Tynan makes carefully conceptualised works exploring repetition and multiples in a quasi-mathematical way. Carol O’Connor, Brioni Connolly, Joseph Noonan-Ganley and Marcel Viday also deserve mention.
NCAD Sculpture tends towards large-scale installations (at least one usually including a wardrobe, and this year is no exception). Such installations entail realistic as opposed to hopelessly optimistic planning, the rapid acquisition of varied skills, and a process of project management on the part of the students that must test them to their limits. Given all of which the results are impressive. The department is also strong on work involving relational aesthetics to a greater or lesser degree. All of this applies equally to the Media department, which features several fine exhibits, including Tobiasz Lawniczak’s two-part interactive installation involving covert surveillance, which has a certain Kafkaesque quality to it.
In terms of numbers it's a thin year for MAs. It's really worth seeing Peter Burns's show of paintings, New Romantic, which consists of mischievous re-workings of iconic myths, paintings, cultural personalities and ideas. Cecilia Bullo bases her work on Antonin Artaud's journey to Ireland in 1936, undertaken to return a staff that he believed belonged to St Patrick. Sheila Hough's atmospheric installation looks at the historical reality and camp appeal of Nazi spectacle.
DLIADT CAN’T match the strength of NCAD in painting, but in sculpture, particularly involving technological elements (Anthony Murphy and Dave Madigan for example), it is strong and, together with DIT, it boasts an outstanding fine art photographic department. In fact, DLIADT doesn’t distinguish between painting, print and sculpture, instead running a Visual Arts Practice department incorporating all these areas. Perhaps it’s still finding its feet. Work often falls down in terms of basic skills. It’s true that fine art graduates don’t have to draw well any more, but they’re unwise to depend on drawing if they’re not good at it.
Several photography graduates excel. Jackie Hehir, who may be the best, restages paintings involving the interaction of a couple, a comment on the way we habitually slip into roles in relationships. She ranges far and wide, from American Gothicto The Arnolfini Weddingby way of The Wounded Poacherand The Meeting on the Turret Stair. All are beautifully done in a way that's both understated and carefully considered.
Julie Hamilton juxtaposed her father’s old photographs of Brigidine nuns with her own contemporary studies of members of the order, making for a thoughtful visual essay on time and change. Philip Lang’s consideration of how we infuse the natural with the supernatural is eloquently done. All the photographic graduates deliver well-defined, ambitious projects with relative success. A couple of the best Visual Arts Practice graduates employ photography, including Gavin Clarke’s nocturnal urban landscapes and Una McMahon’s urban foxes.
Also worthy of mention are Sean O'Sullivan, Jennie Taylor and Saskia Vermeulen, plus Ciara Grant's very capable, Lichtenstein-like paintings, Yvonne Higgins's delicate evocations of individual fantasy worlds, Orla Keeshan's cinematic self-portrait, Angela McAndrew's evocation of overlooked spaces (accessible, Narnia-like, through a cupboard), Denise McCabe's musical ink drawings, Conal McGovern's pipe sculpture and Aoife O'Sullivan's very effective bath-tub installation.
NCAD Fine Art Degree and MA Exhibitions 2009. NCAD Campus, 100 Thomas St, and Fine Art Postgraduate work at The Digital Hub, James St. Until June 14. DLIADT Visual Arts Practice and Photography Graduate Exhibition. 2009 DLIADT Campus, Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire. Until tomorrow.
