Micky Donnelly recently sold his home in Belfast's Lower Ormeau Road and moved to Dublin. His first one-person exhibition in the North in two years - work which he made in Dublin - is currently back up North in a gallery on Belfast's Ormeau Avenue.

The timing of these events is significant for the 44-year-old artist who says his move to the South last September was a "liberation," both creatively and personally.

In his airy studio-cum-apartment in the Fire Station Artists' Studios in Buckingham Street, Donnelly says he has produced inside eight months a body of work which in his unheated studios in Belfast's Queen Street would have taken him up to two years to make.

The work in The Reflex Series show represents a leave-taking of familiar territory for Donnelly. Gone are the teddy bears which recalled the IRA bombing of Warrington, the Easter and Orange Lilies, black ties, bin lids, bowler hats, and other icons and emblems which he often used for his ironic interrogations of Irish cultural identity.

As the catalogue essay for the show states, Donnelly has distanced himself from the "charged symbols of communal disunity and historical memory that for long characterised his caustic and mordant art". Donnelly says his disengagement from such iconography in favour of more formal concerns was set in train before he moved to Dublin.

"It seemed like the work was changing, anyway, away from the more obvious political and cultural references towards something slightly more oblique and more to do with a formal movement within the work," he says. "So it seemed like it would be appropriate at that particular stage to actually allow myself the freedom to forget about the North in a sense, to forget about the social environment that motivated the work to a large degree."

Donnelly says that while living in the North he felt under "some kind of internal obligation" to make work which related to the political situation. "This was because of where I lived on the Lower Ormeau, where people were being killed in the neighbourhood. I was dealing with certain things in the work and it was almost as if I had to continue with that while things were bad up there."

International critics and curators also expected art from Northern Ireland to be about the political situation and went in search of work which fitted a notion of art from troubled times, he says.

"There were other things going on in my work and in other people's work that I thought were being glossed over, and it always bothered me that things were being reduced to a certain level in the work and other things were being ignored, if you like," he says.

"I can understand why people would come to Northern Ireland with those sorts of expectations, but it still seemed to restrict what I was trying to do to a reasonably simple interpretation, and I thought it was time maybe to shift the way the work was seen a bit, move the goal posts a bit to encourage people to look at the work in a different way."

This struggle between public perception and private practice is one that Michael Minnis, another Belfast-born artist now living in Dublin, and currently in the Cruelty exhibition at the Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast, also recognises. "I would be scared, as an artist living in Northern Ireland and making work that relates to the situation, that I would be pigeonholed. That's something that artists in Northern Ireland have always to look out for," says the 33-year-old Minnis, who moved to Dublin in September 1995 with his artist partner, Aine Nic Giolla Coda.

In Belfast, Minnis had worked from a studio in a disused linen mill in the north of the city, which he helped set up along with a group of artists, including Philip Napier.

His painting and photographic work, while closely related to the deprived and bitterly divided urban environment surrounding him, was not overtly political. Based largely on aerial maps of city streets, it explored how city spaces were negotiated, changed and lost.

"I tried to make art which looked at the North in a subtle way. I tried to find ways of working that were outside of making aggressive, expressionist type work," he says.

"It's a bit like journalists cutting their teeth in Northern Ireland, where they are dealing with something that's very, very particular. Journalists go there because it's somewhere where you really have to work out things, and there's that sense for artists as well, that you really have to work out how people relate to each other. A lot of my work was about how space was marked out in Northern Ireland. It's not neutral, you really have to negotiate your positions and how you understand it. It's not like London or any other large city. When you leave that situation you have the skills to understand intricacies, because you have experience of focusing on something very particular."

Minnis is currently working on public art projects in Dublin, Heathrow Airport in London and the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in West Belfast, which is being re-developed with artists involved in the design stage.

He says he is committed to doing work outside gallery settings, in an effort to turn what was formerly a public space theme in his work into work for public spaces.

While Minnis does not share Donnelly's sense of liberation about the move to the South, he acknowledges that, on a practical level, there are more supports for artists in the Republic.

These include FAS schemes, where artists receive social welfare payments while working a 20 hour week, more teaching opportunities, stronger lobbying bodies for artists, the Per Cent for Art Scheme, tax relief on art sales and a much larger art-buying public.

Beyond such practical differences, Donnelly, who became a member of Aosdana last year, says there is a distinct attitudinal difference towards visual arts and culture generally in the Republic.

"Down here it's a positive thing," he says. "While up there there's almost a begrudging acceptance of certain types of art that may be difficult. There's also a begrudging acceptance of change and movement in the North, whereas here it's a kind of positive rush to meet the changes with new ideas and new art forms."

Belfast-born artist John Kindness (46), who is currently exhibiting in the Kerlin Gallery's group show, moved to the South six years ago. He says one of the overwhelming differences between the two cultures is "the feeling that people in the South are pulling together" during events such as the World Cup or the Band Aid appeal.

This communal spirit rarely exists in the North, where "everything that happens is divided along sectarian lines," he says.

"That sense of division is all-pervasive and it wears you down after a while, even if it's not specifically affecting your personal situation," he says.

Kindness points to the conversion of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham into the Irish Museum of Modern Art. "If that building was in Northern Ireland it would probably have been demolished by now or be just a Government building. It would not be a museum of modern art."

However, in Belfast too, there are changes afoot. Kindness is currently designing a museum in Belfast's RVH children's hospital based on the popular children's song about the old lady who swallowed a fly. He is also involved in the RVH redevelopment project which Minnis is working on.

"Those are very positive things," he says. "There are serious amounts of money being spent on them and I found the attitude of the other professionals on both projects very positive. It's very new anywhere in Ireland to actually have artists involved with the design team and sitting down with architects and planners at the beginning of the process like we have done at the RVH."

Kindness says he is also encouraged by Belfast City Council's sponsorship of arts events.

Minnis says he is encouraged by the vibrancy of the visual artists' scene in the North, as opposed to the wider art scene. He says the recently established lobbying group, the Visual Artists' Association of Northern Ireland shows that artists in the North are trying to "make things happen".

"What's interesting is that people are now making links and moving freely between the two places [Belfast and Dublin]. There's great interest among artists in exploring connections. Artists in the North are now looking to Dublin as much as to England and are doing things to help themselves."

Micky Donnelly's The Reflex Series runs at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast until August 23rd. It will be at the Model Arts Centre in Sligo from December 10th to January 6th 1998. It opens in the Temple Bar Gallery in Dublin in mid-February 1998. Dates for the City Gallery in Limerick and Cork's Crawford Gallery are not yet confirmed. Donnelly will also has a one-person show in Dublin's Taylor Gallery in mid-February 1998.

The Summer Group Show at the Kerlin Gallery runs until Saturday September 13th.

The Cruelty exhibition runs at the Fendersky Gallery, Belfast until August 29th.