A startling level of professionalism and a cogent engagement with current issues characterise this year's graduate exhibitions, writes Aidan Dunne.
THERE WAS A TIME when art college graduation shows were family affairs, but more or less since the iconoclastic Freeze exhibition shook up the London art world and Charles Saatchi started buying up the entire shows of individual graduates, things have changed.
The graduate show has become an essential stepping stone to a subsequent career and, more, a chance to put yourself on the map.
We don't have an equivalent of Saatchi in Ireland, but here too, if more recently, the bar has been shifting higher each passing year.
"Professional practice" is now an integral part of every fine art course and, throughout their study, students are encouraged to venture beyond the confines of college and find out what it's like to organise exhibitions in the real world. Graduate shows are judged to a professional standard and a look around this year's Dublin and Dún Laoghaire exhibitions - from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and the Institute of Art, Design Technology (IADT) - provided ample evidence that levels of finish and presentation continue to improve. DIT, for example, which has a hard enough task on its hands in making the most of its Portland Row premises, deserves great credit for a very well presented show.
In every exhibition, as well, the breadth and application of the work on view was really impressive. There was no shortage of graduates who are cogently and articulately engaged with pressing current issues, including immigration and migration, questions surrounding cultural and religious identity, community and housing, environmental degradation, waste, road-traffic accidents, even social networking via the internet, brilliantly enacted by Claire Byrne (IADT), who constructed several vividly defined identities for herself in the process. William Hamilton's I am alive(IADT) was an exceptionally sensitive photographic and audio project exploring the difficult subject of suicide via interviews with individuals who have survived suicide bids.
Coincidentally, Siobhan Conway (NCAD), devised a powerfully atmospheric and affecting installation which chronicled a suicide and its impact on immediate family members. Other graduates also tackled the experience of loss.
It was also interesting to see that not everything had to be issues-based, that people were free to pursue paths of their own choosing. In particular, there was much evidence of a yearning for lyrical storytelling (IADT's Diarmait Grogan, for example), a consideration of nature, and an interest in philosophical and scientific questions.
Frank Little's (IADT) impeccably staged photographs dramatised the idea of consciousness as A Cartesian Theatre of the Mind. Louise Neiland's 366 Moons(NCAD, MA) evoked a cosmic scale in a bravura painting installation which considered the way we measure time in relation to the lunar orbit.
In quite another vein, Sabina Mac Mahon (NCAD) produced a series of sharply satirical works that brilliantly mingle vintage family snapshots with the lives of the saints to produce a comically hybridised religious mythology.
Damien Flood's elegantly made paintings (NCAD, MA) located themselves between fact and fiction based on a 19th-century exploratory voyage.
Lee Welch (NCAD) is interested in the space between truth and falsehood, reality and myth, which he treated in various contexts, including the forensic examination of historical documents, but also the poetic and metaphorical. Given his experience as a curator and gallerist, it is perhaps no surprise that his work is so accomplished.
HOME AND COMMUNITY were popular themes, inventively approached. Garvan Gallagher (IADT) produced a series of portraits of the older inhabitants of his Donegal home town, and in the process provided a richly detailed store of social history.
In another Donegal town, meanwhile, Caroline Kennedy (NCAD) made an excellent series of photographs which considered the home as a set of integrated theatrical constructs. She has great feeling for the dynamics of interlocking spaces. Working with paint, Judy Carroll Deeley (NCAD) looked at our desire to make ideal interiors in architectonic compositions realised with great flair for pattern and a bold, very sure sense of colour.
Paddy O'Brien's (IADT) Marxist analysis of the housing boom was welcome but the images from the front line of new housing developments, while good in themselves, didn't quite merge with the theory.
David Dunne's (NCAD) installation was uncomfortably vivid, consisting of a stuffy, overheated, darkened room lined with bunk beds, one of which may or may not have been occupied by the artist: you just didn't know when you were there. It provided all too effective an intimation of hostel living. Taking the archetypal art space, the White Cube, James P Kinsella (IADT) effected a witty inversion in his installation.
Gayle Anderson (DIT) is one of several graduates whose work reflected an interest in the built environment beyond immediate domesticity, and how we inhabit and relate to it.
Philip Murray (DIT) investigated our invention of an idealised natural realm, the enchanted forest, as a place of escape.
The most sophisticated treatment of designed spaces was to be found in the work of Jamie Saunders (IADT) under the title Conditioned Space. His poised, considered images, some digitally manipulated, evoked the generic, manufactured environments that most of us encounter every day, spaces that we must deal with but which are not, so to speak, for us.
Molly Mishkas (NCAD) memorably engendered a feeling of horror in a series of graphic and sculptural works dramatising the cycle of life and, in another related register, showed a beautiful video enacting a traditional wedding ritual.
Jane Giffney's (NCAD) hirsute fairy-tale figure made a fantastic finale to an already impressive installation. Lucia Barnes (NCAD, MA) brought a sense of humour to the iconography of the operating theatre. More optimistically still, Sally-Anne Kelly's (DIT) body extensions, recalling Rebecca Horn, seemed to promise scope for greater movement and freedom.
As for the anxiety of influence: there was, of course, much of it about. Marlene Dumas's fluent, fluid mode of brush drawing is endemically popular, though people tend to forget that she is technically adept and practised and, if you're not, the results are just going to look messy. That doesn't arise with Tracey Emin, whose terse, confessional drawings, scrawled and spiky, are widely imitated. Ciaran Dooley's (IADT) staged photographs suggest the influence of Jeff Wall, but they also really had something extra, something magical, that suggests he's going places with his work.
It must have taken nerve on the part of Sarah Wilson (DIT) to work her paintings through to the verge of visibility, until the underlying layers were virtually obscured by glazes of creamy off-white, but it was the right thing to do. What comes across is the Beckettian idea of something worthwhile emerging only when all possibilities have been exhausted. You feel Wilson had been on a journey of genuine discovery, and had learned something valuable.
Here she had something in common with Fiona Reilly (NCAD), who works in a different way, but also approaches nothing as closely as possible. Her show was built from the debris of her daily life: bus tickets, coffee cups, brown paper bags, all carefully collected, preserved, arranged and presented to us as emblems of time, habit, routine and life itself. It was brave, witty and incisive.
Increasingly, MA courses are providing a means for artists already embarked on their careers to undertake further research and development. There were several pertinent examples this year. Margaret Fitzgibbon, Geraldine O'Neill, Naomi Sex and Jennifer Cunningham (NCAD, MA) all took advantage of the MA course to explore other possibilities and extend their work in other directions.
There were simply too many works of merit to describe, even to mention, them individually. But some names to look out for: Sanja Todorovic (a formidable painter), Edia Connole, Lesley-Ann O'Connell, Mia Doering (all NCAD), Thomas Woods, Deirdre Judge, Eoin Williams, Andrew Carroll (all IADT), Katie Devine, Roisin Verton, Vincent Ryan, Frances Hayes, Ruth Medjber (all DIT). Although the shows are finished, chances are a great deal of the work they featured will be exhibited again - it's just too good not to be.
