Beauty out of the blue

Reviewed - Empty, Willie Doherty, Kerlin Gallery until Nov 10 (01-6709093); Cherith McKinstry 1928-2004, Jorgensen Fine Art until Oct 28 (01-6619758).

Willie Doherty shows some intriguing new work in Empty. Apart from photographs from two closely interrelated series, Local Solution and Show of Strength, there is the looped eight-minute film that gives the show its title. All of the work is characterised by a sense of dereliction and absence, though surveillance cameras, a staple element of Doherty's iconography, play a major role. Every material object we see is worn, battered and scarred: security cameras in their elaborate metal cages, improvised wooden flagpoles and, in the film, an entire industrial building.

The photographs are exceptionally spare, dominated by expanses of intense blue sky. Intruding into the blue skies of Ulster, however are emblems of tension and sectarian divisions. A press release refers to the ghettoisation of post-Peace Process Northern Ireland. Rather then convergence, there is consolidation of differences as traditional identities are forcefully reasserted.

Doherty is a visually accomplished artist with an eye for the melancholy beauty of what are generally considered to be ugly things including, in the past, massed concrete barriers on country roads, derelict buildings littered with all kinds of rubbish, and indeterminate urban spaces. The ominous aspect of these sites carries over into ostensibly lyrical views of forest and sea, so that they never quite relax into an aesthetic mode. By any standard, the photographs in his current show are quite stark and hard. For richness of texture and imagery, look to Empty.

At first glance you might consider that this, too, is unyielding in terms of visual and narrative texture. There are no actors, nor is there any voice-over, both of which he has used extensively in the past. Essentially, he charts a day in the life of an apparently abandoned building. The paint is peeling off, and the paint is blue, which is presumably of symbolic significance. Security grilles are rusting, vegetation is encroaching. As the hours pass, the site proves to be an excellent subject for Doherty's vein of elegiac, post-industrial imagery. He is fond of indirection and obscurity: multiple reflections, an interior that cannot be seen.

Surely this sad, empty block is contemporary Northern Ireland? Its lick of Belfast Agreement paint fast wearing off, no-one at home, its businesslike air a hollow sham. An economically dependent client statelet where the majority of the elected politicians are curiously reluctant to govern. With St Andrew's providing yet another much-hyped historical turning point that turns out to be, perhaps, nothing of the sort, Doherty's portrait of the Six Counties as a empty office block seems all the more compelling.

Jorgensen Fine Art is showing what is, in essence, a small retrospective of the work of Cherith McKinstry, the Northern Irish artist who died in 2004. A regular exhibitor in the RUA and the RHA annual exhibitions, McKinstry was relatively little known, though she was highly regarded by fellow artists and a substantial circle of admirers. The fact that she had comparatively few solo shows might in part explain this, as might the "lack of pecuniary pressure," as her son Jason puts it in his catalogue account of her life.

Cherith was born in England in 1928 and her family moved to Northern Ireland, her father's home, when she was just a few years old. Despite contracting polio, she recalled her school years in a mansion in the Sperrin Mountains (to where her school was evacuated during the war) as idyllic. She studied at the Belfast College of Art, where she was taught along classical lines, arriving at painting via sculpture and textiles. She met the architect, Robert McKinstry, as a visiting lecturer, and they married in 1958. They had three sons and lived in a beautiful house, Chrome Hill, near Lambeg.

Her profound sympathy for landscape was filtered through her classical training in the production of exceptionally good landscapes. There are many in the Jorgensen show. They are usually muted in colour and tone, though she occasionally upped the ante in terms of the intensity of her colour, and they are very carefully made. They are also greatly enlivened by her attentiveness to the quality of the light. One feels she really inhabited these paintings. Less so, perhaps, with the portraits and figure compositions, though many of them are very good.

In these areas, she was more inclined to stylize, to drift in the directions that didn't suit her quite as well. As with many classical painters, her attempts at experimentation could be uneasy. Moves towards abstraction don't convince. Later on, she embarked on a series of paintings of oil drums, commonly used to mark the sites of road works. They, and other related subjects, are surely indebted to Charlie Brady, but without his relaxed mastery of a particular painterly idiom. She also painted road workers, labourers who are recognisable relations of muscular renaissance nudes.

Cherith also seriously addressed religious subjects, and a number of her efforts in this area are on show at the RHA Gallagher Gallery. They are formidable, amounting to a real attempt to get to grips with biblical themes with traditional means but in a contemporary way. Her passionate involvement with international human rights issues certainly informed her religious works. Robert's profession led to her involvement in several large-scale commissions, including the ceiling of the Grand Opera House in Belfast. She was well up to them.