The border with staying power

Reviewed:

The Border Itself: Temple Bar Gallery until February 11th (016710073); The Farewell Gathering: Solomon Gallery until January 31st (016794237)

The new show at Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery, entitled The Border Itself, documents a remarkable cultural experiment that took place last September when, for two weeks, the Irish Border had its own interpretative centre.

Like all great ideas, it's startlingly obvious. We live in the age of the interpretative centre and are, it would seem, collectively unsure of what to make of any phenomenon, natural or synthetic, without a mediatory guide. And, as the instigator of the centre, Belfast-born John Byrne points out, the Border is "our most significant inland feature".

In September, his project received national press and television coverage when Kevin McAleer officially opened the Border Interpretative Centre on the main Belfast-Dublin road, referring to his own particular pride in "the best little border in the world".

Our Border has, after all, proved to have more staying power than other celebrated borders, such as that between East and West Germany. If we're not careful, he implied, our own Border could go the way of the Berlin Wall, and then where would we be?

A modest, even pathetic structure, with a corrugated tin roof resting on concrete block walls, the centre itself was never likely to be in the running for any major architectural awards. Apart from postcards and models of Border castles - those extraordinary - looking British army watchtowers sited on strategic heights - there were Border T-shirts, sticks of rock, and grow-your-own bags of "The Border Itself".

The central, ironic conceit of the centre, reiterated and emphasised in the exhibition, is that there is a natural something that defines the difference between one side and the other of the Border. Various exhibits struggle vainly to insist on this something, which is in reality exactly what our own and many other borders lack. Soil and grass samples in vitrines are labelled in an authoritative scholarly fashion, identifying them as variously lush, fertile, rugged, curvaceous, and so on, depending on their origin, suggesting some factual basis for perceived differences. There is the suggestion that the Border, like much of our topography, is a residue of the last Ice Age, a geological phenomenon.

Writing about the interpretative centre's brief flowering, Susan McKay noted in the Sunday Tribune that the South Armagh Farmers' and Residents' Committee was displeased. The committee's members felt that Byrne was in some way exploiting something that, to them, creates enormous practical difficulties. Of course, their disapproval was misplaced.

By drawing attention to exactly the kind of thing that the heritage industry, North and South, goes out of its way to avoid, he was foregrounding an uncomfortable truth, which, actually, affords him great satirical scope. To underline its taboo status, he simply conflates the Border with sex, something that "people were reluctant to talk about". As Monaghan farmer Patsy Toman explains in a video interview which forms part of the show, he feels fortunate that his father explained the facts of the Border to him, while many of his contemporaries were left to find out for themselves, as adults were embarrassed to discuss it with their children.

"The Border's only natural," his father told him. "It's only natural that you should have feelings for it - and you shouldn't be ashamed of those feelings."

Born in Donegal, and a graduate of Belfast College of Art, Mary Theresa Keown is a young artist whose work is catholic in its appeal. Not only is she a regular, award-winning exhibitor at Royal Ulster Academy exhibitions, she also looks quite at home in exhibitions like First Look, the young artists' showcase at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in 1999. She is a relatively traditional painter whose work also has an edgy, contemporary appeal.

Her compositions in The Farewell Gathering (perhaps an allusion to the fact that she is now based in Spain) look like cut-and-paste jobs, and they are. She devises them with collage and then makes painted versions.

Each thematically specific work is a flexible patchwork quilt of sources which combine in a sort of unforced coherence. There is enough space left between sources to let us see the joins, so to speak. In fact, each piece is a lively, improvisational play in the space between a nominal subject and the disparate elements that contribute to the eventual image.

She generates lively surfaces, using a nice range of textural effects and bold colour schemes, and there is a curiously old-fashioned air to what she does.

In a way, her work is like a contemporary re-run of Cubism, substituting a promiscuous multiplicity of visual sources for multiple views of the traditional nude or still life. That is, she uses a fairly traditional approach to tackling the problem of making paintings in an image-saturated environment.

There have been many alternative takes on the same problem, from Robert Rauschenberg's to Sigmar Polke's, but, while she lacks the conceptual sophistication of Polke or, to look nearer home, Mark Joyce or Sarah Durcan, she still has a real feeling for generating visually exciting surfaces with paint, which is always a worthwhile knack.