Raised in the Netherlands but settled in Ireland, artist Anita Groener sees her duality as a 'privileged position', writes Aidan Dunne

Road markings and roads themselves are the dominant motifs in Anita Groener's Crossing at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery and the Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. It's appropriate that the show is divided between two venues, because it is substantially about the state of being in between, in transit. It derives from the artist's own experience. Dutch by birth, she grew up and received her art education in the Netherlands. Then, in 1982, she came to Ireland "for a year" and has been based here ever since.

Effectively, settling in Ireland meant establishing a pattern of travelling back and forth. Living abroad, and moving between the two countries, has informed her work in various ways. In the first instance, it led to a period of intense self-exploration, an interrogation of her own feelings and sense of identity, in the idiom of expressionist painting. As time went by, a growing appreciation of the incremental layering of personal histories led to a more considered, meditative treatment of memory and change.

"I feel really at home here, and I always have, funnily enough," she says.

The experience of putting down roots in Ireland - marriage, children, teaching, painting - engendered on the one hand a sense of distance from the past but also a recognition of repeated patterns of experience. Much of her work explores the way those patterns echo down through the generations, affording insights across time and place.

"My formative years lie in Holland," she says. "That means there are aspects of me that will never change because they are part of that place, that culture and time."

Equally, her life in Ireland has shaped what she is now, "so that I will always be part of both, yet not altogether of either, because I'm slightly apart from both". Rather than bemoaning this state of affairs, she feels that "for an artist, that is actually a useful, privileged position".

In a way, Crossing explores and celebrates that position. The open road is a familiar metaphor for freedom, yet, anchored as Groener's roads are between two fixed points, that is not quite her intention. Rather, there is the sense of a valuable, uncertain space between two knowns. In an accompanying essay, Ciaran Benson suggests that, in this context, the road and the journeying it indicates might be viewed as a metaphor for the self. Certainly Groener locates herself there, between.

"It's that time between departure and arrival, when you are between two cultures," she says. "People are usually so preoccupied with getting where they are going that they just regard the journey as time lost."

The routine, the predictable - signified by grids and other patterns of repeated road markings - provides an unexpectedly valuable time. When Groener started to work with video, "I shot sequences of a door opening. I think I was trying to get that idea of the time before arrival".

"I wasn't interested in what was beyond the door. For me, it was as if everything happened before that, getting to that point - like Jim Jarmusch's film, Mystery Train, which is all about explaining how the characters got to the point where the film begins. For me, the time between departure and arrival is the story."

In the video sections of Crossing, Groener uses looped sequences in which we have a driver's eye view of roads unfolding ahead, mostly the flat, straight, misty roads of reclaimed land in Holland. There is a vivid sense of "repetitive, almost hypnotic travelling", as she puts it. The landscape slips by in a blur. While Groener sees video as an extension of painting, a way of incorporating time and sound, the paintings "are like film squashed into single images". They are made with an almost ritualistic use of repeated elements, corresponding to the broken dashes of road markings. Vast conglomerations of roadways form complex networks, rendered with graphic simplicity and directness and, sometimes, humour.

IT SO HAPPENS that several of the best pieces, from small gouaches to the very fine big oil painting, Juncture, feature roads knotted together in tight masses. These could be taken as troubled, congested images, but in the event there is a lightness , a feeling of pleasure to them that is distinctly upbeat. In his seminar on James Joyce, Jacques Lacan proposed that the writer's work was a way of knotting together the three orders of experienced reality: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.

In other words, Joyce's writing is the knot that ties together the bundle of concerns and desires that gives meaning to his life and eventually constitutes his identity. It's an idea that could be applied to any individual, to the extent that we each have a signature knot that holds together the elements of our personal worlds.

Not that Groener had Lacan in mind when she produced Spaghetti Junction-like masses of intersecting roads, but it is interesting that she found herself using it as a motif and, as Benson suggests, the road can be taken as the self. She herself notes: "I used to wonder what exactly art was for me. I've come to the conclusion that it is a physical manifestation of my thinking, of my experience of the world."

Crossing is at the Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery until Mar 5 (01-6612558) and at the Rubicon Gallery until Feb 25 (01-6708055)