The Atrium Gallery in Temple Bar is a difficult space. Extending over several floors, it boasts plenty of room but not much cohesion, even given the oval-shaped cavity that runs down through the building, uniting the floors and providing the motif for the gallery logo. Conventional exhibitions have been sited there satisfactorily, and there have been several attempts, some reasonably successful, to make installations around the singular character of the space. None so successful, though, as the current one, Rachel Joynt's Feed, which is a brilliant piece of work.
It consists of a series of flat ovals, like lily pads, suspended at different levels through the cavity. Each is pierced by a few tiny holes. A silo at the top of the building feeds fine white sand onto the first oval, and as it accumulates some sand finds its way through the holes to the oval below, and so on. The result is a constantly evolving series of landscapes in miniature. The form evokes not only time but also the layering of strata. The structural complexities of Feed resolve themselves into a very simple shape, and this shape is in turn rich in interpretative possibilities. Not to mention the fact that just watching the sandscapes grow and crumble and reform is endlessly fascinating in itself.
IT'S rare that two artists with shows opening in the same week will hit upon pretty much the same idea, but it has happened in the case of Margaret Corcoran and Catherine Greene, at the Kevin Kavanagh and the Solomon respectively. The idea is to represent clothing as if it is animated by a wearer - but the wearer is absent. Corcoran paints pastiches of some renowned pictures of women, Rembrandt's Hendrickje, Manet's Victorine, Delacroix's sister, Henriette, from which the women have fled, leaving their clothes and the identities they have been assigned vacated, frozen in mid air. With Victorine, she seems to flirt with something more: making the ruffs of her sleeves resemble fleshy stumps and giving her dress a livid flush.
There is an obvious, polemical point to this: a reference to a tradition of both objectifying women and writing them out of history as individuals in their own right. Rather than denying their presence, Corcoran's device aims to restore their autonomy, suggesting that we need to look anew at them.
Greene's classical figures adopt a similar strategy, in bronze. They perhaps arise from her evident delight in the way fabric clothes form. It is unusual to see an entire exhibition devoted to modestly scaled conventional bronzes, and this one works very well, not least because there is a sense of a consistent, episodic narrative uniting her varied figures, her harlequins and jester, ladies on horseback, crusaders and pilgrims.
The underlying allegory is of life as pilgrimage. The work's saving grace is that it doesn't become too whimsical, despite the occasional hint of caricature, and Greene's interest in modelling, weight and movement come across all the time.
PRINT X 3, at the Original Print Gallery features three very different but complementary printmakers. If there is a link it is in their common feeling for texture. Anthony Lyttle's work is probably his best seen to date. A quartet of Places are certainly his most spare pieces in terms of surface incident, dominated by expanses of subdued, earthy colours. An accompanying note says that these and his other prints relate to living in urban environments. Hence, presumably, the sometimes dense networks of grids that underlie some of the other compositions, including the fine Enclosures. For the most part, both the texture and rhythm of his work here are exactly right.
Mary Fitzgerald's small prints are schematic representations of houses and their associations of security and comfort, physical and mental. She refers us to the dwellings made for Gods in eastern Balinese temples. She has a nice, delicate touch, but cumulatively the effect is repetitious. Perhaps it's meant to be incantatory, but if so it doesn't quite come off.
The remaining printmaker, Margaret McLoughlin, transports us into a wintry Wicklow in spare but deeply atmospheric evocations of bleak landscapes. At their best they have the precision and economy of Japanese brush drawing, without merely imitating the style. AT THE Bridge Gallery, Chris Wilson's dark, brooding images present us with autumnal interiors and exteriors. For the most part they are engaging variations on his trademark device, that might be summarised as a shadowy view within a derelict church which, on closer inspection, turns out to be made on a street map of Belfast city. The symbolism is stark but quite powerful. Some of the individual pieces, including a view through an oak woodland, consisting of a series of bare stems rising from a carpet of fallen leaves, are very striking and have an eerie beauty.
The upper floor in the same gallery features a quartet of Belfast painters. In work inspired by the writing of Paul Auster, Jennifer Trouton creates compelling, episodic narratives featuring strange, dingy interiors and workaday objects, all with a slightly sinister twist. She very successfully evokes a stylised, literary world with its own distinctive, burnished light.
Rosie McGurran, more predictably, makes illustrative paintings that recall the autobiographical work of Alice Maher or Rita Duffy and, beyond them, Paulo Rego, but she doesn't, as yet, have a great deal to add to anything they have done. Sally Young uses collaged images as forceful metaphors for cultural differences and meeting points. By contrast, Laura McGuire makes rhapsodic, intensely coloured abstracts that are in essence emotional responses to the direct experience of natural landscape.
Rachel Joynt's Feed is in the Atrium at Temple Bar Gallery until April 9th. Margaret Corcoran is at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until April 3rd. Margaret Catherine Greene is at the Solomon Gallery until April 7th. Print X 3 is at the Original Print Gallery until April 6th. Chris Wilson and Four Belfast Artists are at The Bridge Gallery until April 16th.
