A good year for art graduates but what does the future hold now?

VISUAL ART:IT'S BEEN A GOOD year for the art schools. Apart from the calibre of individual graduates, the graduate shows have been impressive in terms of their overall quality and their professionalism. All of which begs the question of what is going to become of the graduates. That question has always been there.

Fine art education has traditionally occupied a slightly anomalous position, outside the academic mainstream. But over the last couple of decades it has become increasingly integrated into academia and locked into a formalised system of qualifications, a network of specialisation, diplomas, undergraduate and masters degrees, and PhDs.

Some of this year’s graduates will go on to complete MAs, in Ireland and elsewhere. Others, including those who have MAs to their names, will look to survive in their own professional practices, but many of the sources of employment that have in the past enabled artists to work part-time are now problematic, with cutbacks in teaching hours, the perceptible contraction of the commercial art market and the scarcity of jobs in the wider economy. By necessity, artists have always been adept at surviving in the micro-economy, but in contemporary Ireland, where living costs remain high, the prospects are daunting.

Cork's Crawford College of Art degree exhibition, Site 46, is open until the end of this week and it is very rich and diverse, reflecting well not only on the students but also on acting head Orla Flynn and her staff. While the Crawford is not a blinkered or conservative institution, it has a reputation for safeguarding the traditional fine art disciplines, something that is borne out by the work in this year's show. But in this respect the Crawford is no longer holding the fort in the way it might once have: there's now a greater tolerance for a plurality of means in the art world in general.

Nor is the Crawford unique in featuring work that displays a wariness of or indifference to current artistic developments. There’s a nostalgic quality to Susan O’Regan’s lyrical, landscape-based mixed media pieces, for example, in the way they embrace a romanticised pictorial idiom without the slightest hint of postmodern irony or distance. At the same time, Oonagh Hurley, who looks to be a very promising artist, is clearly altogether cognisant of what is going on in contemporary painting and takes it into account in works that are made with great verve and intelligence. She refers to the workings of memory and her pictures are fluid, multi-layered distillations of scenes and moments, full of energy and mystery.

Slower in pace and more nuanced in character, Aoife O’Brien’s pictures, depicted spaces “which toy with the viewer’s impulse to believe in them”, are also very accomplished and alert to current painting. In his series of landscapes, inspired by Slievenamon and its surroundings, Andre Van Schaijk (who is good at working on quite a large scale) looks to the conventions of picturesque landscape painting but then sets about testing them, exploring a number of ways of looking at, and constructing an image of, landscape. Equally, Aoife Kennedy’s work recalls American colour field painting, but presses it to yield up something more, something new. She also cites Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler as exemplars and is adventurous in introducing three-dimensional elements, through a process of layered collage, in her compositions, though also very disciplined in the way she does so.

Thammasak Wongkumad has made a series of instruments for generating sound. They refer to various musical instruments, and parts of instruments, but they also have distinct personalities, as though they are portraits of individuals, and they are about communication.

William Lawlor’s overall installation, which addresses our attitudes to the animal kingdom as somehow apart from ourselves, is easily one of the best in the show. So too is Tom Doig’s roomful of wonderfully imaginative resin and collage sculptural blocks. April Curtin takes the hackneyed subject of faded family snapshots – an art school staple this and most years – and makes something fresh and interesting of it.

It’s not clear whether Anita Basteed’s David Bowie obsession is real or artistically contrived, but one suspects the former. Why else go to the lengths depicted in her tattoo video? Engrossing, if a bit disturbing. Jessie May Winchester’s visualisation of the body moving through time is very well done – her drawings are particularly good.

While technically rudimentary in approach, figurative paintings by Jeremiah Galvin and Edel Wilson are exceptionally empathic. Diane Humble and Claire Hanrahan must also be applauded for their inventiveness and high standards.

LIMERICK SCHOOL of Art and Design has benefited from the refurbishment and enhancement of its Clare St campus and it too had a fine graduation show. The print department in Limerick is usually adventurous and so it proved this year. Lizanne Murphy’s photographic evocations of childhood – another art school favourite – were atmospherically rich and, in a good way, uncanny. Colette McNamara spied on the spies with an inventory of surveillance cameras. Patrick Fitzpatrick’s fine photographic and video works considered the transcendent quality of natural imagery. Evelyn Glynn explored the legacy of maltreatment in institutional spaces very well. In general, the conceptual ambition of projects in print was noticeable.

Not all the painters used paint. Marie Shallis produced a memorable series of photographs that began with a consideration of the objectification of women and led to her restaging old family photographs to remarkable effect. Margaret Cairns used video and photography to document and investigate the flooding of Clonmel when the Suir overflowed its banks. She pointed to the policies of Coillte, the forestry agency, as a potential culprit. Niamh O’Bierne created a very lively installation that set out to visualise and dramatise the triangular relationship between artist, curator and audience. Ranging across language, sound and image, she brought some real fresh thinking to bear.

There were painters per se, too. Conor Brennan rendered extreme emotion in facial close-ups, Cainneach Lennon analysed the behaviour of groups through myriad examples, Kelly Power’s ominous images evoked threat in domestic settings, Gemma Killeen incorporated sewing in impressionistic accounts of a working farm and Sean Wynne reconsidered The Sublime. In Sculpture, Stephen Neary’s apocryphal agricultural contraptions wittily hinted at bodily functions, Sarah Bolger employed a similar strategy regarding femininity and domesticity, Alan Bulfin proposed startling inventions with elaborately staged PowerPoint presentations and Bernadette Sheridan considered generational differences and connections with her intricately detailed installation.

Site 46Graduate showcase. Crawford College of Art Design, Sharman Crawford St. Until Sat. Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT Graduate exhibition.