From a Japanese bunny and observations of war, to frenetic installations and brilliant ceramics and jewellery, there was a feast for the eyes and mind at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, writes Aidan Dunne

JAPANESE ARTIST Atsushi Kaga has been based in Ireland for several years, during which time his work has developed on the basis of the distinctly Japanese penchant for cartoon characters. His drawings, paintings and animations centre on the misadventures of an alter ego in the shape of an introspective bunny rabbit who has a troubled relationship with his father and is beset by all manner of doubts and anxieties. His father, incidentally, is a panda rather than a rabbit, which may account for some of the miscommunication between the two. But then his mother is a kangaroo. Maybe it would be as well to bear in mind the theory that all art is self-portraiture of one kind or another.

Kaga has a nice, wry sense of humour, but Bunny's world is also shot through with personal melancholy and in a wider context scepticism about the state of the world. The work tends to be small in scale, informal in mode and quirkily oblique in its narrative approach. If there was an outstanding question about it, it was whether the material had enough substance to sustain a large-scale gallery show and the answer, judging by the Butler Gallery's I want to give love to socially neglected parts of you, that's my mission, is that it does.

Kaga was apparently considering stand-up comedy before he opted for art, and the exhibition demonstrates that he has not only the observational ability and the jokes, but also a developed sense of pace and timing. The show makes excellent use of the Butler's succession of rooms to spring a series of surprises on us as we make our way through. A packed agglomeration of comic-book sequences, mildly edgy and often scatological, introduce us to Bunny's life and times. But just when we're used to the format, we graduate to larger paintings and then to huge, composite, psychedelically coloured drawings and an installation of short video animations. The prevailing mood is wistfully sad, but also constructive and ultimately affirmative. It's tremendously approachable.

So too is Richard Mosse's Trainers at the Heritage Council, next to St Canice's Cathedral. Mosse's photographic and video works juxtapose the real and the simulated in ways that prompt us to look at our relationship to both. His large-scale colour photographs document air-disaster simulations at major airports as well as real disaster sites and scenes of devastation. Killcam is a video incorporating footage of injured soldiers from the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre as they engage in combat simulation games, used there for therapeutic purposes, together with live feed footage of strafing and missile attacks from Iraq, with comments from military personnel.

Thus described, it sounds as if the work could be heavy-handed and overbearing. In fact, the great virtue of Mosse's approach is a certain hands-off quality, as though he is assembling this material and is himself in a state of perplexity about it. In other words, he's not devising an argument and then making and looking for images to substantiate it. He's an observer who is wondering about the nature of the world we've made, but wondering with concentration and insight.

ROTHE HOUSE ON Parliament Street, with its newly restored vegetable garden, makes a good venue, accommodating three artists. Phyllida Barlow has made two terrific installations, both of which engage with tight, enclosed spaces, one a ground-floor room and the other the enclosed courtyard behind it. Her frenetically busy assemblage fashioned from lengths of two-by-four and brightly coloured tape is like a construction site run amok, straining against the confines of the building, while the drum-shaped forms in the courtyard loll at odd angles, resembling crosses between armchairs and dodgem cars.

Mark Garry's minimally stated, ethereal thread drawings or sculptures are ideally located in the attic, where they are caught by shafts of light as you move around the space, appearing and disappearing like rainbows. It's surely a better location for them than a pristine contemporary gallery. Of the three artists in Rothe House, Keith Wilson fares worst, even though he is known for his witty sculptural interventions. They don't seem to get up to speed on this occasion.

Mary McIntyre is best known as a photographic artist but in My Death at St John's Priory she eschews images in favour of sound. It's a monologue in which a male voice intones a series of mostly flaws, referring to death as release and escape. It is married well to its context, and resonates with the confessional religious setting, but it inevitably comes across as a sub-Beckettian exercise in the mode of some of the doleful narrations that form an element of Willie Doherty'svideos. But it is an interesting departure for a thoughtful artist, and might lead to other things.

Dougal McKenzie at Butler House and Neil Butler at the City Council's Arts office on John Street both explore the possibilities of historical narrative in painting. The former reworks vintage holiday photographs, emphasising the gaps and partiality of memory, and the way visual documents are about what is left out as much as what is represented. In New World Symphony: Journey's End, Butler ambitiously creates a contemporary scroll, the story of the fall of an empire which, although he expressly leaves it unnamed and imaginary, does have aspects of the US about it.

Cormac Boydell, an indefatigably adventurous ceramic artist, shows in the Rudolf Heltzel Gallery and his rough-hewn, brilliantly coloured forms, which always have a strong conceptual underpinning, make an effective counterpoint to Heltzel's own impeccably conceived, beautifully fashioned jewellery. Boydell also appears in Image of Longing at the National Craft Gallery, an extensive group show in which craftspeople were invited to make a work "for a person or organisation that inspires them". The curators were Karel Betman and Martha Haveman of Galerie Beeld Aambeeld in The Netherlands. There is a great deal of first-rank work on view, including that by Rachel McKnight, Ann Mulrooney, Joe Hogan, Jane Jermyn, Sonja Landweer, Peter Scroope and many more. For the most part, the inspirational sources named are interesting but the links between them and what we see are largely moot.

Mulrooney is one of the participants in the 10th Sculpture at Kells in Kells Priory, sympathetically curated by Alan Counihan. It includes the fruit of a two-week residency by Maria Kerin. It centred on the participation of local children who feature in the resultant works that acknowledge the fact that the village grew in a close relationship to the priory (Aileen Lambert's sound installation also employs local children in a comparable way). Saturio Alonso's Hope, an installation in a darkened space featuring a coffin-crib, is not for the faint-hearted, though it is a powerful piece.

Michael Quane's Pupa and Moth encourage us to put two and two together, to look at our surroundings and see what we can learn.

Several poems by Kerry Hardie, placed throughout the priory and on the bridge over the King's River, pick up brilliantly on the richly evocative setting. Reading them on-site, so to speak, is a fascinating experience. It is, in all, a good if notably soggy 10th birthday.

THERE'S A LOT of fine, subtle work at Grennan Mill in Thomastown, including, on the ground floor, what is in effect an historical display of fabric samples for ecclesiastical vestments, beautiful pieces of finely detailed work. In a way, it sets the tone for the shows upstairs, for textile elements figure large in Nicola Henley's mixed media pieces inspired by birds in flight. She combines dyes, paints and screen-printing inks to generate subtly coloured and textured surfaces which would be nice in themselves but become something exceptional with the addition of passages of sewn elements: the physical presence of thread and fabric, and the opaque intensity of their colours, embellish the surfaces like nothing else could.

Polly Donnellan achieves something comparable in her richly chromatic studies derived from nature. She builds up layers of ink by screen printing and then incorporates embroidered elements to produce sumptuous, iridescent effects. Ruth Lyons's God Ball is a tremendous, upbeat show, despite the fact that one of her large-scale paintings is titled Grey Day. Actually, title notwithstanding, it's cheerful in tone. It's also a really fine painting, made with a light touch and confident in its massive scale, as with her coloured paper scroll and an inventive sculptural piece that gives the show its title. Dylan Vaughan's photographs speak for themselves. They range from close textural compositions to nighttime views of New York and they are outstanding.

Unfortunately, constraints of time mean that it was impossible to see every exhibition forming part of what is an extensive strand of the festival. Apologies to those, including Kilkenny Collective for Arts Talent Peer-to-Peer, an intriguing project in portraiture, and Estate Yard Art 2008, a group of shows at Castlecomer Estate Yard that is always worth seeing.

• Kilkenny Arts Festival Exhibitions, various venues until Aug 17th. Images of Longing at the National Craft Gallery and Atsushi Kaga at the Butler Gallery continue until Oct 5th