Kilkenny's visual arts programme is a missed opportunity

A festival programme with works by artists like Stephen Loughman looks good on paper but does not add up to a real event, writes AIDAN DUNNE

Surface & Reality

Rothe House, 11 Patrick St and other venues. Until August 15

Tony O’Malley: Constructions

Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny. Until October 31

Settlement and other exhibitions

Grennan Mill Craft School, Thomastown Until August 15

Soul Shrouds

The Berkeley Gallery, Thomastown. Until August 27

In the Landscape

Debra Bowden. Framewell Gallery, Logan St, Thomastown. Until August 15

Locality

Bernadette Kiely. The Barracks, Low St, Thomastown. Until August 15

ON PAPER, the visual arts programme for this year’s Kilkenny Arts Festival looks good. The festival works on a curatorial model, each area of the arts getting its own curator and, by implication, its own slice of the budgetary cake.

Oliver Dowling oversaw the main visual strand under the title Surface & Reality, featuring 11 artists in five locations "running as a pathway through the city". Well, not quite.

In reality there are two main venues, Rothe House and 11 Patrick Street. Rothe House has been better employed as a venue in the past. This time around the art looks like an afterthought in the building.

Number 11 Patrick Street couldn't be a good venue without substantial remodelling. It looks and feels like empty office space, not even superficially disguised. Although Surface & Realityis notionally conceived as one event — an exhibition, rather than a series of exhibitions — Dowling notes that "There is no one theme running through the exhibition."

In fact what’s presented in Kilkenny is more a collection of edited highlights sampling the work of various artists rather than anything like a real event.

Take Stephen Loughman as an example. He is a first-rate, fascinating artist whose paintings explore the process of representation in culture and how we relate to, remember and are influenced by representations. A new body of work was flagged.

A substantial, carefully-presented exhibition of his work, perhaps a survey featuring recent and new work, would have been an exciting major event to unveil in Kilkenny. Significantly, as well, given that he deals with images from popular culture, a large exhibition would have the potential for reaching and engaging with a large audience. In the event any such opportunity wasn’t so much thrown away as not even considered. A row of paintings is hung in a line in a vacant office and that’s about it.

What is true of Loughman here is true of most of the other invited artists. If a festival is serious about what it’s doing it should make a real exhibition, as indeed Kilkenny has done in the past: one thinks back fondly to a featured artist like David Mach, for example. Gathering together a miscellaneous collection of existing works, often made for other venues, does not constitute a significant cultural event, no matter how good the work and the artists.

Maybe the visual arts slice of the festival budget has shrunk, but it would be good if Kilkenny actually set about originating an exhibition next year.

There is what is described as a Visual Arts Strand 2, which seems to consist of shows not programmed by the festival itself but coming in some way or another under its umbrella. The Butler Gallery has always remained at one remove from the festival in that sense, wisely retaining its own independence. By default, because it is actually an original show, Tony O'Malley: Constructionsbecomes the main festival exhibition, though it stands apart from and will run on well beyond it.

For anyone acquainted with O’Malley’s work, it’s required viewing, offering an insight into his creative thinking and adding to our understanding of his lyrical but also incisive imagination. It’s an important show for the Butler to do, and is beautifully documented in a handsome publication by the gallery’s director, Anna O’Sullivan.

It’s interesting that the spirit and atmosphere in Thomastown, which is holding its own independent, parallel festival, is noticeably different. There’s a feeling of energy, enthusiasm and individual commitment that’s positively invigorating. Largely because of the presence of Grennan Mill Craft School, Thomastown has long attracted a substantial artistic population, and the Mill is the largest visual arts venue.

It hosts a major show by Shem Caulfield, Settlement. In drawings and photographs, he considers the close interrelationships between hand-made tools and farm machinery and the way they have, historically, shaped and patterned the agrarian environment.

One ongoing series of photographs documents many local, vernacular styles of wrought-iron gates and their fittings, conveying the elegance of their form. It’s a valuable and illuminating show, and there is inevitably an elegiac tone to it, because it is in part a memorial to a disappearing rural world.

Five other artists and makers feature at the Mill and at least one really demands mention. If there was a prize for the most beautifully designed and installed exhibition in both Kilkenny and Thomastown, it would have to go to Lucinda Robertson, who shows hand-made glass bowls in one gallery at the Mill.

Her work and its level of presentation, devised and indeed made by the artist herself, has an aesthetic rigour and poise directly comparable to the best minimalist sculpture. It relates well, incidentally, to Maria van Kesteren’s superb wood-turned sculptural pieces at the Rudolf Heltzel Gallery in Kilkenny.

In another mill building close by, The Berkeley Gallery features an outstanding solo show by Kathleen Delaney, Soul Shrouds. A group of intricately made sculptures that have at their centre the image of a dress nod to Louise Bourgeois. The dress stands for the person, and Delaney proceeds to suggest rich imaginative worlds by implicating it in a range of imagery that includes houses and other forms of enclosure. Each piece is amazingly detailed and nuanced, and also accessible in terms of meaning.

Debra Bowden's In the Landscapeinaugurates a new gallery in Thomastown, the Framewell Gallery in Logan Street. Bowden studied traditional woodblock printmaking in Japan and she expands the conventions of the technique, using various other materials and even exhibiting the worked blocks themselves. She makes prints, but each is individually finished and hence unique.

Bernadette Kiely found a terrific venue in the Barracks for her show, locality, which marshals some of the paintings and drawings she's made over a decade and more, featuring the immediate landscape and the River Nore in Thomastown and around.