The high calibre of the Galway Arts Festival visual arts strand highlights yet again just how much the city needs a large-scale gallery space, writes Aidan Dunne
The Galway Arts Festival kicked off last Monday evening in Salthill but, the day before, there was an anticipatory event out on Inis Oirr, with the opening of one of Hughie O'Donghue's two festival exhibitions.
This one, at the beautifully situated Áras Éanna, concentrated on the wreck of the Plassy, the rusted hulk of the freighter that ran aground on the east of the island in 1960, and has been a landmark ever since. The overall title of O'Donoghue's shows, The Deep, indicated his desire to reach further than the details of one maritime event, but it was gratifying to see him working from, so to speak, the local and particular to the general.
Just how general became apparent in his work at Fairgreen in Galway city, in a huge new space adjacent to Habitat, temporarily colonised by the festival. From The Tomb of the Diver to a haunting, dreamy, Ophelia-like view of a reclining female figure apparently under water, and a nod towards Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, the underlying theme is human interaction with the sea on every level: harsh and factual, cultural, metaphorical.
The formidable scale of the canvases reinforces the idea of a vast, watery domain.
O'Donoghue has already discussed his work in these pages and his paintings more than live up to expectations.
The festival has traditionally been strong on spectacle and theatre, with a lot of good music and craic thrown in for good measure, plus a qualitative but compromised visual arts strand. A paucity of exhibition venues has been a persistent problem, and one big push to resolve it - the refurbishment of the arts centre - produced a nice though still small-scale space.
This isn't to say that art has to be big to be good, but a large space serves as a focus and challenge. Deirdre O'Mahony, to take a local example, has been consistently ambitious in terms of scale and scope (her Viscaux is at the Fishery Tower.
This year the new City Museum is shown off to good effect by three shows, including the very fragmentary Fragments of a City, featuring samples of early stone carvings from the city - lintels, door frames, spandrels and cornices.
Fragments of a past, one could say, that has not been well served by today's planners.
Apparently this display is more in line with the building's long-term function as a civic museum than the fine art shows: selected work from the Bank of Ireland art collection, and Joseph Albers' often didactic screen and woodblock prints Formulation: Articulation, including works from the Homage to the Square series for which he is best known. It is a beautiful show.
Equally, the bank's collection looks exceptionally fresh. It's terrific to encounter first-rate pieces by Irish painters whose work sets about addressing the landscape in the distinctive light and atmosphere of Galway. Camille Souter, Patrick Collins, Sean McSweeney and Brian Bourke are among them, though the show covers other areas as well, including pop and formalism. And Barrie Cooke's Big Forest, Borneo looks superb.
Photographically, the Middle East dominates. Danish photographer Jan Garrup's Scars of David at the Aula Maxima is drawn from two complementary projects in which he documented daily life on both sides of the second Intifada, specifically following the stories of boys and young men in Ramallah on the Palestinian West Bank and in Hebron, the Israeli settlement town. His immensely close, detailed accounts, surely obtained at considerable personal risk, take the form of conventional photo-essay narratives, in black-and-white.
There is a wrenching chronicle of the death of a Palestinian youth and a series of insights into the lives on both sides of the divide, but he is not looking for heroes and villains. What comes across is his weary, helpless awareness of the inevitability of conflict based on entrenched hatreds, his dismay at the way young minds on both sides are cast in predetermined roles.
More reportage in Conflict Inherited at the Arts Centre, in which we see extensive portfolios of work by six photojournalists, three Israeli and three Palestinian (Oded Balilty, Nir Kafri, Gali Tibbon, Ammar Awad, Khalil Hamra and Jaafar Ashtiyeh), all of whom have grown up against a background of strife. These people report daily, and bravely, often from situations of perilous uncertainty. Yet because of the frameworks within which they work, they are usually telling horribly predictable stories, and one problem about this is that viewers can take from it what they choose, essentially bolstering their own prejudices rather than obtaining a critical distance, which is where Garrup probably has the edge.
As does Ori Gersht, whose film installation The Forest was originally accompanied by photographic images, though not in its current incarnation at the Arts Centre.
The forest in question is in the Ukraine, and Gersht alludes to the way various cultural and political meanings have been projected onto it throughout European history. In writing about the roots of German nationalism, Isaiah Berlin has described the way the vast, primeval European forest was identified as quintessentially Germanic by critics of the Enlightenment. As it happens, the forest became a refuge for Gersht's antecedents, fleeing German persecution during the second World War, when, showing remarkable resourcefulness, they survived in extremely difficult circumstances as partisans.
At the Kenny Gallery, John Ffrench's exuberant ceramics are gathered under the title A Personal Journey. There are playful, anthropomorphic and strongly graphic qualities to Ffrench's pieces that suggest the influence of Picasso.
His best works are bold, cohesive and direct variations on classical form, delivered informally and with great panache.
They undercut, though amiably, the pretensions of more straight-laced ceramics. But, oddly, his detailed, composite wall panels can seem fussy and twee by comparison.
Ard Bia scored quite a coup in bringing the three-strong Icelandic Love Corporation over for a slapstick live performance that combined their staple champagne with ramshackle carpentry and, even more alarmingly, some axe work. Yet despite the element of destructiveness their message is positive. The Corporation members are strikingly attired in delirious variations on traditional Icelandic costume. Their warm, zany inventiveness is a welcome addition to the festival.
Also uplifting is Hans Beenhakker's Time Steps Dance, on Spanish Parade, in which contemporary performers dance in response to archival clips of hoofers from the 1930s and 1940s.
At GTI, Artspace have a fine, very wellmounted show, Chimera, featuring work in various media, including live performance, by 27 artists. The studio's membership is exceptionally strong and includes Aideen Barry, Ben Geoghegan, Valerie Joyce, Dolores Lyne, Kevin Mooney, Caterine O'Leanachain and Mark Salmon.
Peter Blake's Alphabet is an intriguing idea that doesn't quite come together: a visual alphabet based on Blake's obsessively compiled store of miscellaneous imagery and informed by his Pop Art beginnings. Hence K for The King: an Elvis collage.
In terms of visual arts, Project '06, billed as an alternative festival, is more an unofficial fringe. The highlight, The Irish Eye at the Kenny Gallery, is a compendium of familiar names selected by artist Padraic Reaney. Brian Bourke, Sean McSweeney, John Behan and many others feature. There is fine work by Jane O'Malley and, interestingly, Bob Quinn, though otherwise there is an almost retrospective quality to it. Response to Japanese Peace and Reconciliation at Swan
House is a fascinating project worth spending time with. And Anita Murphy's photographic portraits of year-round bathers at Blackrock, Bathers: 365, is exceptionally good.
Back to the official festival. The roster of solo shows features a mix of old and new reliables, including Tom Mathews at Mulligan, Victoria McCormack at the NUI Galway Gallery, Susan McWilliams inventively incorporated in Art Bia Cafe, Frank Morzuch's spectacular sculptural installation at the Aula Maxima, Patrick Pye at the Norman Villa, Janet Pierce at Art Essence and Colm Hogan's photographic portraits of the late John McGahern at the White Room. At Sheridan's Wine Bar, Harriet Leander's paintings show great grasp of patterns of energetic flow, and she has an instinctive feeling for a distinctive, creamy palette.
As a piece of public art, David Mach's Hell Bent provides a nice flourish, perhaps best encountered unawares. At regular intervals, a huge sculpted fire-eater breathes a huge jet of flame across the City Museum Plaza at Spanish Parade.
Children of all ages loved it.
The very quality of the festival shows underlines the fact that Galway still stands in need of a good municipal gallery space. It should happen as part of the current phase of development in the city, and it would greatly enhance the west, not to mention its immeasurable benefits to the substantial artistic population in the region.
Equally, it could be said (and indeed was, by artists and those working on the ground), the festival needs a dedicated artistic team in terms of logistics and installation. These needs overlap, and if the West is to realise its artistic potential they must be met.
