How the personal becomes wrapped up in the political

Visual Arts:Reviewed After the Fact,video works by Michelle Deignan. The LAB, Foley Street Mon-Sat 10am-5pm Until April 17 01-2225455 Kate Walsh & Jennifer Cunningham, two printmakers. Mermaid Arts Centre, Main Street, Bray Mon-Sat 10am-6pm Until April 14 01-2724030

Michelle Deignan's After the Factat the LAB is a fascinating exhibition. Mind you, you have to put in the time: it comprises five substantial video works, all quite involved, all requiring sustained attention. Lest that sound too forbidding, the good news is that they are also funny and entertaining, and they work on several levels, prompting us to reflect on what we are looking at, not only in the gallery but all the time, on mainstream television.

Her work addresses two areas particularly pertinent to the contemporary world: the representation and mediation of experience; and surveillance. There is a strongly autobiographical flavour to most of what she does. Actors playing the role of television presenters or reporters give anecdotal accounts to camera of episodes in her life. Workaday events are recounted with the gravitas of news programmes. It is engaging, and amusing in itself and in incidental detail - witness the account of her encounter with an elderly, racist customer in a pharmacy. And after a while you think: well, why not? There is a certain absurdity to the relentless dissemination of information by rolling news channels, and Deignan's videos catch that perfectly.

It becomes apparent that the day-to-day life of this one individual, a kind of Everywoman, intersects and is implicated in a web of cultural and political issues, and that the same necessarily holds true for everyone else as well. In one piece, for example, we hear of her experience working on the decoration of an Irish-themed pub in Italy. In a skilful piece of narrative, delivered by a third-person reporter, after the fact, we get a sense of her feelings of cultural displacement, and learn that the adjacent military airbase is being used as a staging post for rendition flights that may be illegal. In a world characterised by globalisation and rampant commodification, Deignan implies, the personal is inevitably wrapped up in the political, and to underline the point she tries to get to the much-filmed location for television news reports, outside 10 Downing St, in To Camera.

In Unmaking or Redoing she recounts how she and a companion came to be photographed by a police surveillance unit when wandering down a street in East London. Instead of merely walking away, she opted to ask why. Because they had emerged from a suspect premises, she is told. In fact, and rather worryingly, they had not emerged from the building in question, but simply stopped to look in the window out of idle curiosity. A mistake then, and she is told that the information will be erased. To get hold of the surveillance photo, though, she will have to apply to her local police station.

Which she does, vainly.

Her treatment of this material in Unmakingor Redoingdoes not, in fact, amount to anything like her best piece, perhaps because we see too much of her hesitant progress through the location with an actor she is priming to play the role of narrator. The whole thing becomes a bit too meandering. A degree of meandering is actually integral to her approach, and generally works very well, and to be fair Unmaking,despite its relative weakness, is intriguing in its layering of the process of representation. A similar effect is obtained in Assumed Positionin which, showing exemplary nerve, she plays the role of an artist taking a series of impromptu street portraits of passersby on a pedestrian link in London's financial district.

The latter is largely, and successfully, a video of an extended feat of performance, with a voice-over commentary. Unmaking suffers, perhaps, because it is one strand too many in a slightly overcrowded show. The effect of any individual piece is exceptional. Given the level of overlap, five together in one space tends to dilute the impact. It's hardly incidental that the work is achieved with tremendous competence, technically, and in terms of its dramatic elements, both writing and performance. It really is a user-friendly show.

IN THE FRESHLYspruced up gallery of the Mermaid Arts Centre, two printmakers offer different takes on childhood. Kate Walsh's cheerfully coloured images, mostly etchings hand-painted with watercolour, have a decorative, storybook quality. The figures are deliberately stylised, drawn from wire maquettes, so that they resemble puppets or dolls rather than real people. Which is appropriate, because her work is a rosy-hued recollection of growing up on Bray's seafront. The subjects are anecdotal and the mood light-hearted. There is no great depth, but then she is not trying for depth, and she does what she does very well.

So far, the work of the other exhibitor, Jennifer Cunningham, has been seen chiefly in her native Galway. It was immediately apparent that she is a gifted, incisive draughtsperson. Her line is exploratory and infused with nervous energy. You could say that these are old-fashioned virtues. Much of contemporary art practice has turned its back on felicitous drawing, as though embarrassed by the overt display of technical skill. Bad drawing, on the other hand, is okay and non-threatening. One wondered, when Cunningham first showed work, whether she would be diverted into other areas of expression, would be prompted to distance herself from her own talent.

So far, she hasn't. Perhaps that's partly because she has also had an area of subject matter that seems to engross her. Again, from the start, she has addressed the experiences of childhood and growing up with great sensitivity. The individuals she depicts occupy the outside world, but we are directed to their inward reflections.

Pretty much everything she does presents this balance between inner and outer worlds. Her subjects are often caught at moments where they realise their own isolation.

Often this sense of isolation grows within relationships. That is, we see in her work children and adolescents and young adults developing emotionally through the networks of relationships within which we all live, from immediate family bonds to intense early friendships and rivalries, to subsequent attachments and losses.

There is also an awareness of role playing and a delight in imaginative potential. The openness and rawness of Cunningham's graphic style, which always takes the risk of faltering and failing, is well-suited to this subject matter.