Janet Mullarney's major new exhibition at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, The Perfect Family, takes up from Domestic Gods, her Glen Dimplex show at IMMA earlier this year. As we work our way through the rooms containing the various members of her perfect family, we quickly realise that the title is ironic. The family is anything but perfect, and the gods that are woven into the very fabric of everyday domestic reality are not necessarily benign. The linked ideals of religion and domesticity are not as desirable or as positive as we might expect. Yet it's not just a case of the unfortunate individual beaten down by repressive institutions. Hovering in the stairwell that leads to the first room of the exhibition, a host of angelic figures watches protectively over us, guarding us against the tribulations of life. And our path through the exhibition is essentially a journey towards personal enlightenment - a path as structured in its own way as the story of a saint's life in early Italian art.

Mullarney was born in Dublin. Now she splits her time between Ireland and Italy. After leaving school, she travelled to Italy with "vague ideas" of pursuing a career in art. Painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence did little to clarify her aims, though she did realise that painting was not going to be her primary interest. She diverted into furniture restoration, which brought her into contact with wood-carving, but it wasn't until she started carving her own pieces in the early 1980s that she realised that sculpture might be her forte. In fact she is a fine, fluent carver. From the first, her work has been forthrightly figurative. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s she created a host of figures, leaping, stretching, flying, exulting in their own athleticism and physicality. They were often painted with masks and bodymarkings suggesting tribal ritual, but they were not culturally specific. It was as if Mullarney's imagination was finally liberated and allowed free rein, and her underlying theme was also liberation. Her figures were striving to be free of various real and symbolic constraints.

Throughout the 1990s her imagery has become more complex, eclectic, and allegorical, and more explicitly concerned with inner life. Animals have become major players in the dramas of selfhood she invents, like the huge mass of the bull - an archetypal male presence, but also very much the beast within - that sprawls with a woman on a mattress in her brilliant Aftermath. The techniques and aesthetics of folk art have been significant influences, and the intimacy and informality of her work play against the aloof perfectionism of classical sculptural tradition. There is a readily identifiable fund of Christian iconography in The Perfect Family. "There is a religious tone to much of the work," Mullarney readily agrees, "which has to do with such things as memories of oppressiveness. It is specifically Catholic because that happens to be my background. But it's not about Catholicism as such. I would apply the same sentiments to any religion. This happens everywhere."

A Madonna and child, a Christ-like figure, and a Pieta are all immediately recognisable. But these icons are variously recast. The Madonna's halo is a spinning roulette wheel and her hand is a livid red, suggesting guilt. Her dress is made from a blue floral wallpaper. The child with her is notably ill at ease. As Mullarney sees it, the wallpaper refers to a stifling domesticity. Rather than interpreting her work in terms of a fixed, didactic intent, as we might the early Italian models that to some extent inspired it, it makes more sense to see her as throwing stones into the calm pool of a specific iconographic tradition and agitating its surface to create new patterns. Here, she identifies with the hapless child, who perhaps "overhears but does not understand", and whose incomprehension and uncertainty number among the legacies of family life. Her bearded Christ, lurking half visible in an old wardrobe, is a father figure, "a homage to the complex emotions of the absent father." The wardrobe has a mirrored door. Part of the silvering has been scraped away, so that you can peer through and see the figure within. "You look in a mirror to see yourself, but to explain yourself you must look further, into your past" - to, in this case, a symbolic father.

The point comes up again with her Pieta group, titled Compound Equation. "For me it's about forgiveness. I was thinking about the idea of a family tree, not in the sense of a lineage of names, but how we are the product of ideas, of the religious dogma, the social structures, to which our parents and our parents' parents subscribed, and there is a huge element of chance to this." The dilemma we face, though, here and now, is in trying to determine "what is authentically you, and what is the product of these various impositions?". This problem is visualised in the next room, which is dominated by a shivering, vulnerable, partially covered figure sitting hunched on a bed. The bed sits on an extraordinary "carpet" of blue-coloured sawdust. "I first saw it used at a Corpus Christi Festival in a little village in Italy. Preparations for this festival take six months, then it's all over in about two hours. All that work is only visible for two hours, then it's gone. But what I took from that is the way we can be more generous to ourselves when we're in that state of mind."

The human figure has the head of a donkey. "It's about guilt and inhibition. Our self-identity and our sexuality are a unity, not separate things. But it's so difficult to shrug off these handicaps, to discard these deep inhibitions and prohibitions." Perched over on the wall is a smaller scale sculpture of a dog on a mattress, the other side of the coin. "Quite simply, for me the dog stands for unabashed, animal sexuality. This figure on the bed, miserable and stubbornly trapped in a mind-set of conditioning, might well envy the pure, instinctive sexuality of the animal." Where the dog is shameless, the donkey is stubbornness itself. "I use animals in a very straightforward way, and that has to do with how we think of animals in human terms, of their characters and qualities - you know, as stubborn as a mule, as clever as a fox, as free as a bird. When I think of a horse I see it as a blinkered animal. People see all this animal imagery and they say you must be very fond of animals, but actually I'm not particularly fond of animals at all. It's being able to use them to comment on us that interests me." The final piece is a remarkable room within a room. Against a deep indigo background, you stoop to enter a basic, plaster-clad, rectangular structure. Walls, floor and ceiling are covered in gold, a light shines from the far end. But this radiant, sacred space is empty, except for you, the viewer. If it is a church, the gods have fled or been evicted. "It is," Mullarney explains, "about making a precious space for yourself. Throw out the gods and let yourself in."

The Perfect Family by Janet Mullarney can be seen at the Hugh Lane Gallery until January 25th. Next year it will tour to the Limerick City Gallery and Kilkenny's Butler Gallery.