Visual Art: Reviewed - Launch: Making Do, The Lab, Foley St until Jan 20.Launch: Making Do sets out to address a specific difficulty faced by artists at the start of their careers: how to make the transition from an institutional context to the wider world. It is usually very difficult for an artist to move on into what is usually dubbed, in art school parlance, professional practice.

The world of galleries, both publicly funded and commercial, of studios and other opportunities for development, is daunting and hard to break into. A small number of exhibition venues, notably including the Ashford Gallery in Dublin and more recently Gallery 126 in Galway, do provide much needed venues for younger artists.

Now Launch, which arises from an initiative on the part of Lee Welch and Linda Quinlan of the artist-run FOUR Gallery, aims to broaden the existing level of support. It was conceived as a co-ordinate strategy. At its heart is an exhibition, and a very good one, Making Do, but it is also an awards programme.

The awards are not financial, rather they consist of further exhibition and studio residency opportunities. Welch and Quinlan have managed to garner a wide level of support. The graduates are drawn from DIT, Dún Laoghaire's IADT and the NCAD. Dublin City Council has mounted the show in its gallery, the Lab, backed by Visual Artists Ireland. Fire Station Artists' Studios, FOUR, Gallery 126, the Leitrim Sculpture Centre, NIVAL, Queen St Studios Belfast and the Signal Arts Centre Bray have all committed themselves to awards.

It shouldn't be thought though, that the artists are being handed anything on a plate. The process is very demanding of them. A leading Irish curator, London-based Paul O'Neill, was enlisted to make a show with nine participating artists, three from each institution. For him, it was never going to be a case of gathering work from each artist and laying it out from A to Z in the gallery. The artists were invited to look at the space, to consider each other's work and figure out how everything would fit together.

"There was a lot of negotiation between the artists," O'Neill reports. "For me, working in this way, it was difficult to establish a curatorial structure. But in the end I think what most of these artists have in common is that they have ways of taking everyday materials and subverting their given logic." The title he chose, Making Do, refers to his curatorial predicament but also this improvisational approach in a wider context. It's taken from a text by Michel de Certeau about ways and means of doing just that: using but redirecting the everyday to step outside the passive model of consumer culture.

That is a reasonable description of the show we see at the Lab. The nine artists make up an outstanding, heterogeneous group. All challenge conventional ways of reading everyday experience and surroundings. Priscila Fernandes who was one of the stars of the NCAD graduate show, and her pieces here elaborate on one of her alter egos, Ana Garcini, including her Breakfast Manifesto, a video performance that is also a deadpan treatise on how to eat a sandwich.

Fernandes is remarkably capable across a wide range of disciplines. She says she is enjoying the post-college period of solitary studio work. She developed artistic alter egos as a way of establishing critical distance from her own work, but also because, in a globalised consumer culture "we have become divided people, wanting to do everything and be everywhere".

Molly-Marie Louise O'Dwyer shone in the DIT show and several of her composite video-performance pieces are included. She draws on elements of domestic routine, pushing them to extremes by means of repetition or exaggeration, such as stacking cans of food, hanging out washing, or cleaning. She has a flair for performance, developing an exceptional intensity.

"I accent the obsessiveness and what I'd describe as the claustrophobia of suburbia. You take things in your own life and use them. I was thinking of the context of 'home' in various ways, including the barriers that can exist between people in the same space. Viewers can take from it whatever they find relevant, but I've found that women of around middle age seem to identify with it very strongly."

There is an obsessive quality to Fiona O'Connor's elegantly designed video installation as well, though in a more Beckettian, pared-down way. O'Connor moved from photography to video and the idea of the still image is still central to what she does. The two linked camera views in her video are static. A wooden "arm" rhythmically covers a blackboard with chalk marks in regular swathes. Beneath, an initially dark screen gradually accumulates points of white, like stars or lights. "It is", she explains, "the dust from the chalk." It's a beautifully contained, metaphorically rich piece.

Both Keith McCann and Sarah O'Neill use bits and piece of discarded everyday materials, usually functional, in their sculptural installations. McCann combines sections of oil drums, girders, lengths of timber, packing cases, carpet off-cuts, cling film, nylon cord, car windscreens and comparable materials in precisely specified constructions arranged along geometrical axes. We sense an order at work but cannot quite figure out the functional logic. "I look a lot, finding levels and angles," he explains. "I'm interested in systems, systems of distribution or communication for example, and the way different systems overlap and interconnect."

So his pieces are in a sense symbolic representations of multiple systems, with an element of mystery: just as we are never quite sure how the complexity of a working city hangs together.

O'Neill's constructions are, she feels "more paintings than anything", even though they are three-dimensional and employ a range of materials, particularly sawn and painted wood sheeting. She sets up sequences of forms in an almost musical way, recalling early 20th-century constructivist art and the Dadaists. She colonises the space of the Lab quite dramatically, her pieces unfolding in an easy, conversational manner. Aoife Merrigan colonises space in quite another way. The work she shows was sparked by a news story about the dramatic proliferation of discarded red rubber bands in England due to their constant use by the postal service. Merrigan makes sculptural interventions using rubber bands. Her pieces invite double takes - you glimpse and have to look again. "I started working like that originally because of the issue of space in college. People are always fighting for space. I started looking at the undesirable spaces, the stairwells, the landings, the corners and figuring out ways to use them. It began as a way with coping with limitations but in the end I came to really like those kind of spaces. I like the idea of surprising people, and I think they are a lot more observant that they are generally given credit for."

Fiona Whitty's video Conversations Over Food is excerpted from a larger, very ambitious project based on prolonged contact with Nigerian immigrants in Dublin. Her conversations with women are laid over vivid, appetising videos of food preparation.

"They're conversations about women's rights," Whitty explains. "They explain something of why they are here, why they left Nigeria. In working with asylum seekers, I quickly discarded the idea of simply making representations of them. What interested me was to create a space, a space in which they could tell their own stories, as real people with real experiences." She has succeeded extremely well.

That gives a flavour of the nature and range of work in Making Do, but there isn't a weak note in the show, which also includes Niall de Buitlear's taxonomic projects, a kind of archaeology of everyday life and Maire O'Mahony's site-specific wall paintings. All the exhibitors will go on to take up a residency or the offer of a solo show. All richly deserve their opportunities.