Dublin batik artist Bernadette Madden's current exhibition bemoans the lack of open space in the capital, writes Aidan Dunne.

The Vanishing Skies indicated in the title of Bernadette Madden's exhibition, open from September 1st at the Hallward Gallery, are the skies over Dublin. Are they vanishing? Yes, she feels, they are, in the sense that the city is filling in and the skyline is inexorably diminishing. From ground level, "Dublin is getting darker and darker," she says.

She was born and bred in Dublin. "I grew up on the north side and moved over to Herbert Place to go to the National College of Art and Design. That was when the college was beside the National Library, next to Leinster House." Apart from a move to Ranelagh for a while, she has been based in the same locality ever since. Now she lives and works at Beggar's Bush. Look towards the river and the skyline is dominated by a veritable forest of cranes. The whole character of the area is undeniably changing drastically, but Madden is at pains to point out that she is no Nimby.

"It's just something I've become conscious of. I've nothing against high rise buildings in themselves, for example. In fact most of the development isn't particularly high-rise at all. Dublin is not a high-rise city. But all the same, you do get the feeling that every open space is being filled in, every piece of ground is being exploited, right to the pavement edge, and the result is that our sense of space and out personal skies are disappearing."

There are a couple of issues tied up in her observation. One is the lack of regular open, public spaces to punctuate the built blocks.

"They seem to be able to do it in cities on the continent. I mean those little piazzas and squares where you can just sit down and look around." Whereas planners here, she argues, are more concerned with the letter of the law. The quality of life doesn't come into it. Which suits, as she terms them, the "developers from hell" but not people who live and work in the city.

"I know the city very well but on a few occasions I've almost gotten lost, because you can walk through an area of new development and there are no landmark buildings. They're anonymous. And Grand Canal Street is becoming a dark street, which it never was."

Once the thought of the effect of the changes occurred to her she started to look at the city's skyline in a more systematic way. "I came up with the idea of making work about it." She set about gaining access to high vantage points throughout the centre of the city. Some of these are obvious - including Liberty Hall, the Gravity Bar in the Guinness Storehouse, the Bank of Ireland in Baggot Street - and some less so.

"I went to anyone I knew who works in suitable buildings." Once aloft, she took photographs of the city stretching away to the skyline. She built up what David Hockney has termed "joiners", that is, composite images comprising multiple overlapping individual photographs. From these she worked out compositions.

While there is an elegiac or cautionary note in the reference to Vanishing Skies, it is worth pointing out that the work is not so much a lament for something lost as a celebration of what is there. There is an organic quality to the way the city has developed through a combination of chance and design. The irregular grid of buildings each with their distinctive character generate complex patterns that engage the eye.

Madden is known as a batik artist. At first glance, to set out to achieve something as complex as her cityscapes in batik seems ambitious.

But she has in the past pushed the limits of the medium and our expectations of it. "This is something that often arises," she says.

"Batik is a craft, but it annoys me when people say it's 'only' a craft, with all that that implies. There is a craft element to it, but really I see it as a method of painting as effective as any other."

In the event, she has used the nature of the medium appropriately and ingeniously. The way the dye washes through the fabric, cutting across the linear patterning, gives a tremendously airy, open feeling to the expanses of rooftops and skies. This is further accentuated in several extremely large pieces, one featuring the Liffey flowing through the centre. There are familiar landmarks, including the Spire, so you are able to figure out the approximate vantage point in most cases.

There is also a smaller series of screen prints. "I like screen printing, I find the process - both the thought process and the physical process - very similar to batik." She also likes the flexibility of it all, and makes variable rather than uniform editions, introducing variations in the colour from print to print.

Real warmth for the city comes across in her images. But she comes back to the way things are closing in. Changes in the physical fabric mean that "things are changing in other ways as well. When I first moved here it was a real neighbourhood. "Generally you knew most people around, and you could live here in the sense of shopping and so on. Now, for example, there isn't a single butcher shop within walking distance. People shop by car. Those small shops catering to the immediate area are disappearing." In the meantime, her new work points to aspects of the city worth preserving, if it's not already too late.

Vanishing Skies by Bernadette Madden is at the Hallward Gallery, 65 Merrion Square from Sept 1st to 16th (01-6621482).