On the Town: Artist Alice Maher transformed the Green on Red Gallery into a virtual forest for her fourth solo show, Rood, which opened in Dublin this week. "I love the gloom of the gallery," said artist Fergus Martin on arrival.
"Yeah, it's like a cathedral," agreed artist James O'Nolan.
Maher's show includes tracery drawings by snails on the gallery's windows and a series of beech-tree branches, which hang vertically from a beam in the ceiling as if growing upside down.
"It's like standing at the bottom of a lake and looking up. It's like a reflection," said photographer and artist Maeve Hickey.
"It's the essence of Offaly in one sense," said her husband, artist Dermot Seymour, hinting at the place where the beeches come from, between Ferbane and Clara.
"I feel there's a strong classical undercurrent or historical feeling in the way she's going back to old measurements [a rood] and the church-like windows," said Jerome Ó Drisceoil, owner of Green on Red.
Others at the opening on Tuesday were Noel Kelly, of the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios; Prof Lawrence Taylor, of NUI Maynooth; artist Mark O'Kelly; and Maeve Connolly, of Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Artist Cliona Harmey loved the beech sculpture, which is called Rood, because of "the way it divides the space and the way the light shines through".
Bankers Keira Swan (from Portmarnock) and Anne O'Donoghue (from Rathmines) both loved the sculpture of two heads, called Double Venus.
"It's almost Grecian, but then when you look at the connection [between the heads], there are all sorts of hidden messages and subtleties," said O'Donoghue.
Others at the opening included artists Cecily Brennan and Daphne Plessner and Maher's cousin, Cindy Martin, from Limerick and her friend, art teacher Valerie O'Sullivan.
Rood continues at the Green on Red Gallery, 26-28 Lombard Street East, Dublin 2, until Sat, Sep 10