Finding a middle ground between East and West

VISUAL ARTS:Two shows celebrate the work of the late printmaker Moya Bligh and another combines the gothic and the experimental, writes AIDAN DUNNE

TWO SHOWS in Temple Bar serve to commemorate the late Moya Bligh, the Kilkenny-born printmaker who died almost a year ago after a road accident in Kyoto. She had been based in Japan for about 30 years. A small solo display at the Graphic Studio Gallery captures the flavour of her mature work, which manages to incorporate the techniques and spirit of traditional Japanese printmaking while remaining entirely true to her own sensibility. Idir / Aida, meanwhile, at the Original Print Gallery, is a five-person show that she was in the process of organising at the time of her death. It marks 50 years of diplomatic ties between Ireland and Japan, and it includes work by her.

Her affinity with Japan, and, in terms of artistic method, with Japanese woodblock printing, extends back to her time at the NCAD in the 1970s. It wasn’t quite predictable in terms of what she was doing at the time, but once she came into contact with Japanese art she was completely smitten. Temperamentally she always liked spontaneity, and bold, broad, expressive gestures. These qualities were all consistent with Japanese art, and perhaps the characteristics she was drawn to in it related more to calmness, precision and delicacy. Certainly she learned how to balance boldness with tact and restraint as her own work developed.

After completing her studies at the NCAD, with the help of a Japanese ministry of education scholarship, she went to study at Tama Art University in the Tokyo region. There she met a fellow student, Junichi Sato. For a while she was torn between settling back in Ireland or committing herself to Japan, and Japan won out. She and Sato married (they have a son, now studying at third level) and they lived in Kyoto. She taught woodblock printing at an art university, pursued her own work, and she maintained contact with Ireland and family, returning almost annually to visit, giving workshops in woodblock printing.

There is no sense of her being an exile in the work she made in Japan. She seems completely at home in woodblock prints that find a middle ground between East and West, perhaps leaning noticeably more towards the East, without suggesting any of the anxieties of influence. Her three woodblock scrolls at the Graphic Studio Gallery are especially good. Elegant, spare, abstracted and obliquely allusive, they include three short poems in English translation. They are in fact three of five scrolls she made for a group exhibition in Canada drawing on the Hyakunin Issyu, the model for a poetry anthology form that has been much used in Japan, featuring poems by 100 contributors each time.

Her other works make witty reference to mille-feuillepastry and have an appropriately freer, lighter touch. They comprise incisive graphic marks and multiply folded and stitched sheets of paper and are as much relief sculptures as they are prints, which is not at all a bad thing. The show only runs for a week and ends on Friday, alas, so if you want to catch it do so immediately. Apart from Bligh herself, Idir / Aidaat the Original Print Gallery features work by two other Irish printmakers with known, long-established Japanese links, Richard Gorman and John Graham.

The two Japanese printmakers, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yoko Hara, meet their Irish counterparts halfway. Both are exceptionally capable printmakers, in line with Japan’s renown in the field, and both are noticeably eclectic in their approaches, the former opting for a multi-panel format that features a succession of representational and mark-making modes, Eastern and Western. The latter is painterly, creating amorphous fields of soft colour with great sensitivity.

Apart from his work as a contemporary art curator with wide tastes and a flair for finding innovative work, Mark St John Ellis has long been involved in a musical project, Elijah's Mantle, as composer and performer. While Elijah's Mantle's music certainly comes under the heading of gothic in several respects, it is also experimental, incorporating ambient and electronic elements. One composition, Observations of an Atheist, is at the heart not only of the installation in nag, the basement space it occupies in the Cross Gallery, but also of a group show St John Ellis has curated upstairs in the main gallery space, all colours black (two).

The title of the group show is a good indicator of the gothic tendency underlying the enterprise but, again, like the music, the end result is anything but formulaic and predictable. It encompasses, for example, a series of really beautiful line drawings in ink by Jane Proctor, meditative considerations of the square format, made on Japanese paper, each a formidable piece in its own right (and, should one say, very modestly priced considering their quality and character).

There’s also a striking concave acrylic sculpture by Gavin O’Curry, a form that draws us in and traps our eyes in a black, slickly reflective surface. Michael Coleman’s extraordinary painting on un-stretched canvas has a couple of ingenious touches, one of them a centrally positioned button, which immediately makes us question the nature of the surface. The biggest piece is by John Beattie, an atmospheric expanse of tonal washes from black to white. It’s actually the floor and a section of wall from the artist’s workspace, systematically painted during the course of an installation, and it works very well as a painting.

Dee McDonnell's flair for finding unsettling aspects in workaday utensils is on display in her piece Into the stillness beyond. Add Seamus O'Rourke's dark ink paintings and Tom O'Dea's cleverly distorted picture frame and you have a substantial, consistently engrossing exhibition. Add the soundtrack music audible from the basement below and it all seems of a piece. The film itself, the order of its sequences changing indefinitely, is inspired by the dark moody spaces and heightened drama of Caravaggio's paintings, juxtaposing human flesh and lavish displays of fruit and foodstuffs.

A Tribute to Moya Bligh, Graphic Studio Gallery, Cope St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, until Jan 22; Idir/AidaOriginal Print Gallery, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin 2, until Feb 6; all colours black (two)and Observations of an Atheist, Cross Gallery, 59 Francis St, Dublin 8, until Feb 6