ALIENS, frogs, erotic figures, semen stains, bacteria under a telescope, ancient urns.
The images in Micky Donnelly's new work - which opens in Kilkenny's Butler Gallery today - are as varied as the viewer's imagination.
The reason for this is that the work recalls the famous ink blots devised in 1921 by Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach, for psychiatric diagnosis.
Donnelly has named his ink blots The Reflex Series - the title referring to both the physical process of folding canvas in two to create a central symmetrical pattern, and the viewer response based on an involuntary reaction to the pattern.
The backdrops to these blots are washed out, blotchy and scarred. The large multiple panel canvases have rough patches of scrim and squares of chintz attached, rendering them reminiscent of peeling wallpaper and crumbling walls glimpsed in abandoned houses.
Though the ink patterns are created by a largely random process, the work is not left to chance. Donnelly's subsequent interventions are calculated to be at times ironic, humorous, erotic and more. "A mixture of chance, contingency and control," is his description of the artistic process.
"In some ways I'm trying to force the viewer to look at these and use some sort of unconscious or subconscious reference. If they're going to be scary, they're fake scary. If they're going to be erotic, they're fake erotic."
Donnelly tempers suggestions of overplayfulness in the work by constrained references such as modernist grids or thin horizontal lines which echo the repetitive abstracts of the Canadian artist Agnes Martin.
With this show, Donnelly has ditched the loaded political and cultural symbols such as Easter and orange lilies, shillelaghs, bin lids and black ties which have for long characterised his at times mordant work. This creative departure coincides with his leave taking last September of his native Belfast for Dublin, where he is living in the Fire Station Artists Studios.