Musical instruments for sitting in, tents that sing, flashing raincoats on tracks - the visual art at this year's Galway Arts Festival is full of action, sound and idiosyncratic humour, writes Aidan Dunne
Comfortably installed in a shiny new building on the Cluain Mhuire campus, Soundshapes is a remarkable project, and a strange one. It is difficult to classify, which is a good thing rather than a bad thing. It has obviously required a high level of long-term commitment from everyone involved. They could not have known where it was all going to lead, if anywhere at all, but in the event they have come up something special. Curators Sean McCrum and Hilary Morley - though in this case the term involved rather more than the usual curatorial input - brought together the 23 participants.
Some are composers and performers of music, some are craft workers, some sculptors. The idea was, through collaborative interaction, to come up with innovative, offbeat or just different sound objects and sounds. You could call the end result sculptures with an acoustic dimension, or sculptural instruments. The essential point is that they all involve, or are directly capable of producing, sounds, or can be used to create music. There is an audio CD to prove it. But Soundshapes is also interactive. As these things go, very interactive.
Many younger visitors are not averse to interacting vigorously and enthusiastically with the pieces, which probably inspires mixed feelings on the part of the curators.
On the one hand, they must be gratified to know that the premise works; on the other, they must feel a little nervous on behalf of some of the beautiful objects that are in the firing-line - though the instructions on what you can and cannot do with each piece are clear and specific and prominently displayed.
Some of the works have a quirky eccen- tricity about them, as though dreamed up by a storybook boffin. The partnership of designers and makers Paul Finch and Lynn Kirkham operates under the name Greenmantle. They are especially interested in community-based projects with an emphasis on recycled and sustainable materials. With composer and performer Aranos, they have come up with a striking, basket-woven Musical Chair in the shape of a big acoustic horn. It comes equipped with pedals, and pedalling unleashes Aranos's ambitious and eclectic music.
Equally idiosyncratic, and agreeable, is Caroline Walshe's and Jennifer Walshe's terrific fake fur-lined tent installation, warm/cold. You settle into the tent, read one of a series of prompts, which they hope will inspire a bit of vocalisation on your part, into a telephone, and your efforts will be relayed, via low-level speakers, to the outside space. This could be described as a mainstream sculptural installation, and a very good one.
Sculptor Peter Strassner and composer Slavek Kwi (a busy man on this project - his name recurs throughout) have come up with Rocking Sounds Tower. A group of strongly coloured wood chimes, suspended inside a hollowed, scorched tree-trunk, make wonderful clunky noises.
This sound, like most of the others, has a distinctive character. In several cases, that character is oriental, particularly in the case of the gentle, percussive sounds of wood and ceramic in one form or another. Artist Inge van Doorslaer and Kwi's Various Grains of White is a good example of this subtle, thoughtful sound world. Luckily for the more boisterous visitors, by no means all the sounds are as gentle, and it can all get quite cacophonous with pieces like Robert Tully's clamorous hollow metal tubes, there to bring out the drummer in everyone.
Soundshapes was fortuitous for sculptor Graham Gingles, who makes exceptionally atmospheric sculptural boxes. In his case, the incorporation of sound (by the very inventive composer, Elaine Agnew) seems like a logical step.
Ceramicist Clare Greene has made some beautiful stoneware forms in a fine collaboration with composer Grainne Mulvey. If you don't catch the show in Galway you should make a point of visiting it at another venue, when it travels on to Dublin, Limerick, Sligo, Kilkenny, Belfast and Derry.
ALSO at Cluain Mhuire, Galway/Mayo Institute of Technology hosts a big, exceptionally good exhibition of artists' prints, The Infernal Method. The show marks the retirement of the institute's director, Dr Gay Corr, and it is a pretty good tribute. In her introductory catalogue essay, the exhibition co-ordinator, Sioban Piercy, herself a pre-eminent printmaker, elucidates on her choice of title, which is quoted from the great visionary artist, William Blake. Blake worked extensively in print and, for him, Piercy explains, "art was the issue of the intercourse of the 'divine' imagination with the 'infernal' nature of the print process: a true marriage of heaven and hell". Why infernal? Because of all those metals and corrosive acids.
Piercy is clearly aware that printmakers tend to be ghetto-ised in the fine art community, for various reasons.
Alan Cristea points to the dilution of the concept of the auditioned fine art print by the specious use of such terms as "original print" in art marketing exercises. Such misuse reinforces the association of print with mass- production. But there are also other factors, including the role of technique.
The unkind view might be that many artists have disappeared into the labyrinthine complexities of print technique for its own sake.
Great artist printmakers, like Rembrandt or Goya, have an incredible fluency in the medium that is never a distraction.
Something of this fluency is to be found in the work of Norman Ackroyd, a technically brilliant printmaker who also has a subject-matter that absorbs him: that is, the edge-of-the-world landscape of the western seaboard. His etchings are ingeniously atmospheric. In any case, Piercy argues that print's contested status, however unfair, gives it a certain oppositional cachet.
That is one of her arguments. The other is the work itself, which is of a consistently high quality, lively, diverse and enormously enjoyable. Terence Gravett's hugely accomplished, and for that matter just plain huge, exuberantly colourful compositions are in themselves enough to banish the stereotype of the printmaker poring over ever-darkening rectangles of inky shadows. But then the same could be said for Cath Taylor's brilliant Wall of Pleasure, which combines words and colour simply and effectively.
Piercy herself is always adventurous, technically and thematically, and there is a great deal more print on view that tests the boundaries. Among the highlights are works by Mary-Rose O'Neill, Colette Nolan, Catherine Lynch, Aiden Linehan, John Graham and James Allen.
The Galway Arts Centre features an installation by Andrew Kearney. Kearney is a technological whiz who sizes up a venue, figures out what needs to be done, orders a truckload of stuff from the electronic components supplier, knits it all ingeniously together and . . . well, it's hard to say exactly what it is he does.
He makes atmospheric installations that envelop the viewer. They are usually dyn- amic. Often, within them, environmental conditions will change in response to constantly changing environmental information relayed from another location. The nature of the information is curiously arbitrary. It could be shifts in light intensity, or random sounds.
However, you would be hard put to say what they are about, or whether they are about anything in that sense. It seems more likely that we are supposed just to experience them. Kearney said once in an interview that he quite liked the idea of leaving viewers with a sense of exclusion, prompting them to relate to feelings of exclusion in a wider context. Sometimes his work has echoes of the Cuban artist, Felix Gonzales-Torres.
In Galway, he occupies three rooms of the Arts Centre. In one, a black raincoat studded with lightbulbs shuttles back and forth along a section of track, lights glowing and fading. In another, strobe lights glow and fade to an ominous soundtrack. Inthe third, night-time video images of trees are projected. The effect is of a haunted disco, death waiting in a black coat.
Three graffiti artists are also showing at the Arts Centre, but they turn out to be on their best behaviour. The finest work displays a strong sense of pattern. Manus Walsh, subject of a retrospective at the Kenny Gallery, is a well-known and widely respected painter with great facility and an innate instinct for pictorial design. He was a friend of George Campbell and, as an artist, he is very much in that mould. This brief mention doesn't do the work justice, but it is well worth seeing.
Next to the festival box office, Stephen Dee's ambitious mixed-media Freakshow? is proving to be a big draw. An engrossing trawl through the world of 1920s US sideshows, it is amazingly touching.
There is also exceptional empathy in Denis Felix's portrait photographs, of people from Africa to Ireland, at the Aula Maxima at NUI Galway. Melancholy humour is the dominant note of Philip Lindey's paintings at the University Gallery. They mix meticulous technique with caricaturish oddity.
The Galway Arts Festival continues until Sunday. www.galwayartsfestival.ie
