Reviewed:

Prayers Before Dying, Alan Counihan, Temple Bar Gallery until July 8 (091-6710073)

John Graham, prints and drawings, Green on Red Gallery until July 21 (01-6713414)

Notes to the Passer-by, Beth O'Halloran, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until June 30 (01-8740064)

Angela Hackett, Gillian Lawlor and Makiko Nakamura, paintings, Ashford Gallery until June 30 (01-6617286)

Chris Wilson and Brigitta Seck, Bridge Galley until June 30 (01-8729702) James McKeown, paintings, Solomon Gallery, ends today (01- 6794237)

Alan Counihan's Prayers Before Dying is a beautifully made and beautifully installed exhibition. It encompasses stone sculptures, a series of vessel shapes fashioned chiefly from such found materials as bone and feathers, and colour photographs of site-specific outdoor installations made in the landscape.

The vessel forms are pointedly ambiguous. On the one hand, as boats, they are versions of something inanimate and functional. On the other, they clearly stand in for living things, not only because of their organic constituents, but also in the way these materials underline what might almost be the show's central metaphor, of life as a voyage.

Images and intimations of death abound in the form of the skeletal remains of humans and animals, either incorporated in pieces in the gallery or depicted in spectacular natural settings. Yet the overall mood of the show is not gloom at the inevitability of death and disintegration, but one of precarious optimism and hope.

In some virtuoso pieces of stone carving, swathes of Kilkenny limestone become, in a very unforced way, a pair of wings. In other carvings, the hollowness of the dead skull is equated with the hollowness of the egg in which life forms. And there is the promise of the voyage, the leap of imagination. All of this is delivered tactfully. There is perhaps too much work in the gallery, but in terms of technical quality, and of its energetic engagement with ideas, it is brilliantly sustained.

John Graham's Green on Red show features two sets of work: a series of big carborundum prints and a series of drawings. The latter, methodical accumulations of ruled, parallel lines (with some variations), recall drawing exercises, and Graham notes that they did, in a way, begin as exercises, a means of keeping still, of staying in the room when he embarked on a studio residency at IMMA. They are displayed flat, at table height and don't really transcend their origins.

The prints are a different kettle of fish, although there is an almost ritualistic aspect to them as well. A thick, heavy black line describes patterns of spare, interlocking loops. The rigorous format, and the oriental, calligraphic feel of these pieces recall Brice Marden's Cold Mountain paintings. In fact, the term "feel" is central to them. They depend on everything coming across as perfectly pitched: the quality of the line, the elegance of the form. They have, in other words, to feel right. And they do, though in a curiously limited, perhaps too undemanding way. You just wish there was a bit more in the way of risk, a bit of an edge to it all.

There is a bit more to Notes to the Passer-by, Beth O'Halloran's fine Kevin Kavanagh Gallery show, which takes on an interesting complex of ideas. Her mixed media pieces tenuously but persuasively link Chinese brush painting with the spontaneity of urban graffiti, seeing in both gestural evidence of fleeting presence. Actually that isn't all. O'Halloran goes on to explore the way urban surfaces become invested with a history by chance and design, and her images aim for and mostly achieve a casual, offhand precision, each something made by design that looks as if it happened by chance. She also has a very good, not at all obvious colour sense.

The three painters in the Ashford Gallery have in common a liking for texture. Gillian Lawlor creates great tracts of empty surface charged with energy. One risk with this kind of refined textural painting is that it will become a little too refined, too precious, and Lawlor is continually on the edge of doing just that, but she is a good artist with a basically sound instinct. Angela Hackett's painting installation inventively uses a corner site to create an enveloping environment in a slightly looser, more organic idiom.

The third artist, Makiko Nakamura shows two large paintings, both untitled and one a diptych, and both exceptionally, even startlingly good. Her work, she remarks in a brief, thoughtful statement, is concerned with "disappearance and erasing", and the large subjects, of presence, loss and absence that loom behind those two things.

And it really is, rather than just indulging in the rhetoric, as is common. The smoky, burnished, metallic surfaces of her paintings bear traces of overall grid patterns and other methodical markings, half there, half already gone. The absolute precision of her method and the sureness of her instinct, plus the sombre presence of her work, mark her out as an artist of exceptional quality.

Chris Wilson's staple idea, which he has developed and elaborated over many years now, is a singular way of presenting the layered history of place. He is from Co Antrim, and the place is usually Belfast. Dark images of a disused church interior are typically overlaid on Belfast street-maps.

In his current Bridge Gallery show, the pattern of charred wood forms a background texture to church interiors, and the maps underlie some remarkable images of an oak wood. Through this juxtaposition of references, Wilson invites several lines of interpretation. There is a severity to his work, a heavy-handedness, but the oak wood pieces particularly are striking as images. He shares the gallery with ceramicist Brigitta Seck, whose meticulously detailed, crisply made vessel and vase forms are elegant and nicely judged. Some larger sculptural pieces are less sure-footed, though.

James McKeown, a grandson of the Ulster painter Tom Carr, is a comparably conventional, unpretentious representational painter. His subjects - figures, interiors, landscapes - are low-key and quietly observed. Yet his cumulative concentration on a woman in a variety of intimate domestic settings - from bathing to dressing or undressing, reading to sipping tea - suggests a fixity of purpose akin to Bonnard's obsessive observation of his wife Marthe over many years. Bonnard is mentioned in the catalogue, but McKeown is no Bonnard. Still, his style of plain representation is admirably unpretentious and there is warmth and even tenderness in his depictions of the rituals of daily life.