Disturbingly domestic

Ordinary household objects come under scrutiny in new exhibitions by Maud Cotter and Mark Swords while Brian Henderson shows “conversational” paintings that are tightly argued and coherent

THERE'S A through-the-looking- glass feeling to Maud Cotter's new show, More Than One Way Out, at the Rubicon Gallery. Ascend the flight of stairs from St Stephen's Green and you're suddenly in another world entirely, one in which the familiarity of everyday domesticity is turned on its head. Inanimate objects take on a life of their own and willfully assume strange and disturbing form. There are just three pieces in the exhibition, which is perfectly conceived as one continuous installation. Their titles are oblique, but we can easily think of them as a table, a dresser and a sideboard. All of which fit very smoothly in the gallery's Georgian interior with its paired windows and wood mouldings.

While the pieces refer to ordinary domestic objects, however, they are objects run amok. The table has divided itself into three curvilinear sections and grown many additional legs. These elaborately turned legs don't make up matching sets. They not only mingle several different eras and styles of furniture design, they have also grown to a towering, dysfunctional height, elevating the distorted table tops to a point of unusability and diminishing us humans. In John Fuller's novel Flying to Nowhere, crafted and carpentered wood springs back to life and reverts to its arboreal origins. Cotter's furniture takes on a life of its own, becoming a species that mutates and evolves over time into something startling and other while retaining all the hallmarks of expert craft.

On rows of shelves in a corner – the dresser – a set of china has become an exotic playground for a number of moulded plastic animals. Copious spouts and pools of transparent silicone stand in for water and the entire ensemble makes for a riotous display. It's an exuberant and startling work. As, for that matter, is her more abstract piece, A Gesture of Belief in the Built World, which features a kind of volcanic eruption in a humble sauceboat and a proliferating, lattice-work form that occupies a middle ground between the organic and the constructed.

This middle ground is very much where Cotter’s work belongs.

While there is a rebellious undercurrent to the notion of these domestic things throwing off their servile role, it’s not just a question of a domestic upset. Cotter also seems to be interested in much more: in the boundary between organic and inorganic processes, and in the point where things become animate, and perhaps how we invent things that take on an uncontrollable, unpredictable life of their own. Mostly, though, she’s made a series of fantastic and provocative tableaux that will delight and entertain you.

MARK SWORDS's Flying Crookedat the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery provides a good indication of why he is one of the artists included in Futures at the RHA. Futures is a major group exhibition that, say its curators Patrick Murphy and Ruth Carroll, reflects a current preoccupation among artists with "making", meaning an engagement with materials, and "the nuance of the handmade and in some cases the homemade". Swords's work at the Kevin Kavanagh references carpets, wallpaper, a fire screen, a chair and a floor mat – in fact an example of the latter is a kind of mat lying on the floor of the gallery.

Carpet, the first piece you encounter in the show, is an oil painting of a carpet, but it's on the wall. Its subject is a section of a richly patterned though not particularly nice carpet, and the interesting thing is that Swords has made such a terrific painting from an apparently lacklustre subject. As you work your way on through the show, Swords seems to disassemble, analyse and quirkily reconstruct each object of interest. He uses thread and string as well as paint, and embroidery features along the way.

Clearly he’s looking at the process of making things, and at the notion of pattern itself, and all the time he’s also considering painting, the nuts and bolts of constructing a representation of something that is also a thing in itself. He takes us with him, never pretending to an authoritative status, but learning bit by bit as he goes along. It makes him an engaging companion. When each piece in the show registers as more than the sum of its part, the result is all the more impressive for this consistent lack of pretence.

BRIAN HENDERSON's Planned Palimpsestsat the Taylor Galleries is a big exhibition, extending through four rooms and two storeys, with some large-scale and many smaller scale paintings. What shows through in these palimpsests, symbolically, is a particular tradition of modern painting, and the work is really Henderson's extended dialogue with that tradition, encountered at a distance and close-up, during the years he spent in New York. It is American painting and painters, particularly, who seem to interest Henderson.

His multi-panel paintings, made by means of a complicated technique on sheets of etched and sanded aluminium, have a suitably episodic, conversational format. They echo, or might echo, a number of artists, sculptors as well as painters, including Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Richard Serra and, Brice Marden. The casual looping brush strokes of Marden’s work, particularly his Cold Mountain series. This is not to say, though, that Henderson merely echoes what others have done. His references to a whole range of artistic practice are clearly conscious and calculated. He wants to draw us into the conversation about what it is possible and desirable to do within certain technical and stylistic constraints in painting today.

Does he reach a conclusion to that conversation himself? Yes and no. He is a very capable artist with a formidable technical arsenal, able to manipulate materials at will. He has a good, occasionally audacious colour sense and a strong grasp of texture and surface qualities. There is probably too much work in his exhibition, though, and some of it digresses into areas that take away from its central strengths. Still, much of it is tightly argued, coherent and felicitous. It’s more than worth a visit and a careful look.

More Than One Way Out:

Recent work by Maud Cotter

Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin;

Flying Crooked: Mark Swords, one of the exhibitors in ‘Futures’ at the RHA, Kevin Kavanagh, Chancery Lane, Dublin.

Planned Palimpsests: New works by Brian Henderson, Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare St, Dublin.