Straining, simplified figures

JANET Mullarney belongs to the number of Irish artists who have earned their spurs outside Ireland - in her case, Italy. Not until her 1990 exhibition, mounted at the Crawford Gallery in Cork and at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, had she shown in her homeland. Her present exhibition, at Temple Bar, has already been seen at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo. (Incidentally the director there, Jobst Greave, also curated her Project exhibition six years previously).

Mullarney is not an easy artist to tag. She is, in essence, a sculptor, but she also employs paintings and graphic works in her quasi-conceptual scenarios. This demands a good deal of room, though in Sligo she skilfully emphasised empty space around her creations - sometimes no more than a single figure (animal, human or bird) and a larger painting on paper, to a room. At the moment, in the studio she occupies in Kilmainham under IMMA's resident artists scheme, she is doing mainly paintings, though as yet she has no clearly defined idea as to how or when she will exhibit these. In style they resemble the New Expressionism - training, simplified human figures and animals - but are really products of her own personal symbolism.

She has lived in Italy since her teens and went to art college there; the teaching was rigorously traditional and conservative, and she did not profit much from it and even reacted against it. As a schoolgirl, however, she was "always drawing" and won prizes in the Caltex and Glen Abbey competitions. After art school she was about ten years "doing nothing in particular, taking all sorts of jobs". Among them was a good deal of restoring, not of paintings but mainly of objects in wood: "that has been very important to me." (Her 1990 exhibition was built around wood figures, generally airborne, but she says firmly that she does not want to be typed as merely a wood-carver or a creator of flying figures.)

Finally she began to make sculptures, small ones at first, and her first major show was that same one which travelled to Ireland in 1990. Basing herself near Florence, where she has a studio in a large country house, she began to build up a reputation in a very tough, competitive environment. She has never married: "If you have a career, it is very difficult. I admire those who can, but I do not think I could do it. Being an artist 15 a fulltime job, it takes everything you have." Neither has she ever been an art teacher the usual career by which struggling artists keep afloat.

AT FIRST she worked entirely in wood, but wood can get you into a very sticky area, which is very close to craft," and she points out that many of her recent pieces are deliberately small and fragile. "A lot of my work is about how you inhibit yourself, about how you say `I cannot' in so many situations ... But then the artist in you says `do what you like to do...'" The ravens and animals which figure prominently in her work have a special meaning for her in this psychological field.

She has never worked for a private gallery, either in Italy or Ireland: "I have never gone looking for one, and they have never come looking for me. I live by my work - and for a long time it was very unfashionable, but now figurative work has come back on the ground level. Paladino is an example ... Italy is very fashion-conscious, but I can only do what I do; I don't have a job. My exhibition in Florence went down very well, and I was pleased - Florence is a big city, and it is very hard to make any impact there. I got a lot of recognition from it. Lord knows where it will lead to, but things do seem to be opening up. That is a great relief, because it's hard to do your own promotion and your own work.

SHE has worked on a number of commissions, her biggest so far being one which she recently finished in Holland for the architect Adolfo Natalini. His scheme joined two old buildings together with a high glass roof, a balance of old with new, and in this great space" she has placed two figures, one of them flying through the air, the other as though emerging from the wall. She has aimed to express the "thought" or psychic space between them.

"I have a piece too down in Waterville, in Kerry. I gather it's out of doors, though it was not meant to be - maybe the cancer patients were upset by it. Though I can understand the situation; I have had cancer myself."

Of contemporary Irish artists - and she feels that contemporary Irish culture has made an impact internationally - she cites Kathy Prendergast, Alice Maher and Dorothy Cross. She is interested in the Irish Scene and "what is happening here"; she has been to America a few times, "just to look around," and has also travelled to India, where she was struck by the way the people _ there dressed up temple figures and other things "the way children dress up dolls". The colours, in particular, fascinated her.

Outside the present generation here, she thinks that the late Oisin Kelly was "a brilliant sculptor". Italy, it goes without saying, exposed her to centuries of art, and the sculptures of Giambologna and the paintings of Pontormo made a special impact. Among the 20th-century Italians, she especially admires Marino Marini ("I can see now that he has had a big influence on me") and Arturo Martini. "In Italy, you have sculpture all around you - I only realise that when I come to Ireland."