Like the old school essay staple, the story of a 10penny piece, the central work in Siobhan Hapaska's Kerlin Gallery exhibition aims to give us a perceptual jolt by dislodging us from an habitual point of view. In a variation on Ruskin's pathetic fallacy, she contrives a Christmas tree's view of Christmas. Having shed its needles, the fir tree stands resplendent but bare in its glass case. A second glance reveals that the needles are mysteriously collected in the glass baubles that still hang from its branches.
"I had the idea of doing something with a Christmas tree for a long time," Hapaska explains. "I was thinking about the life cycle of the Christmas tree, you know, how people search for a perfectly balanced tree and put so much into decorating it. It seems to symbolise everything that's good, our hopes for the future. "And then, once Christmas is over, we can't wait to get rid of it, it suddenly seems to become the symbol of everything that's gone wrong with our lives, with disappointed expectations. And for months afterwards you see these sad discarded trees lying all over the place. Once I started noticing them I kept seeing them, all through summer even."
The notion of thwarted expectations surfaces in another way in her photograph of a dead sheep.
"It was New Year's Day 2000," she says. "There was such incredible hype, so much talk of the future, and I came across this poor dead sheep. It seemed to me that a lot more would have happened by the time we got to the year 2001, and this image struck me as being about that. Perhaps there's a sense in it of the natural world being done in by technology."
In relation to the Christmas tree piece, she was also thinking of a work by Joseph Beuys, a bare fir tree standing in a room with a circle of fallen needles around it. "It's about gravity, how everything ends with gravity. What I've done is to play on the idea of how we go to extreme ends to deter gravity, to keep everything up in the air," she explains.
Hence her Christmas tree, having served its purpose, is condemned to exist, sadly and parodically, in a state of perpetual seasonal buoyancy.
It's a predicament characteristic of much of Hapaska's work, which ranges freely through a bewildering variety of forms and materials, from photography to ultra-realistic figurative sculpture to spare abstract fibreglass forms and elaborate kinetic devices, often incorporating sound as well as movement. Born in Belfast, she studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and completed an MFA at Goldsmith's College, London, cradle of the Young British Artists (YBAs). She now lives in London and has a three-year-old child.
She didn't feature in the YBA showcase, Sensation, at the Royal Academy in 1997, but then, if she was so inclined, she could point to an even more impressive accolade that same year: she was invited to take part in the prestigious international show, Documenta X, at Kassel.
Based in London since her college days, she has built a solid international reputation, showing throughout Europe and the US (and as far afield as Japan), and picking up the Glen Dimplex Artist's Award in 1998. Now, with another sculptor, Grace Weir, she will represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale later this year.
Underlying her interest in technology - and technological form - on one hand and the purely organic on the other is a preoccupation with the fundamental human "restless yearning for an indeterminate elsewhere". Restlessness, movement and a paradoxical stasis often feature in her work. She clearly likes tumbleweed, having used it before. It appears in this show in Ecstatic, shuttling endlessly around the slick square top of a box-like construction.
"In American films, the image of tumbleweed is often used as a metaphor for freedom," she says. Yet here she has locked it into a mechanical, repetitive motion.
"Yes. I've condemned it to a routine when it should be free. I thought of letting it go round in circles, but then it seems to me that would be too expressive, even romantic, too full of possibility, whereas the square is monotonous, fixed.
"It's an architectural form, like an office, or a domestic room. But perhaps there's also the idea that too much freedom might be the equivalent of having no freedom at all."
In another kinetic piece, chips of magnetite (a mineral which is strongly magnetised in its natural state), prompted by an unseen mobile magnet, move restlessly around a flat surface, converging and separating as if in response to some autonomous inner agenda. This relates indirectly to Hapaska's antipathy to the natural landscape.
"People say they like being out in the landscape because it's vast and unchanging and there is this sense of timelessness. I get incredibly uneasy, I get this overwhelming sense of my own mortality because everything is so fixed and unchanging," she says.
"I like the city, where everything is going on all the time and you can get involved in it all. Yet of course the landscape is not really fixed. If we could see it on a geological timescale, everything is actually in a state of constant flux."
If a sense of autonomous life seems to flicker in the magnetite, it is implied even more strongly in a large staged photograph, a pieta. Shot from Primrose Hill in London, against a panoramic backdrop of the city, complete with the London Eye and the Millennium Dome, it features, in the place of Mary, a man who cradles the inert form not of Christ, but of a human-sized robot.
It's a skinless robot, all clusters and tangles of wiring and metal, and complex mechanical components. It looks like the real thing.
"It is the real thing," Hapaska confirms. "It's a bipedal robot with complicated elastic `muscles'. Except that they discovered in making it that the muscles that enable us to do simple things like walk are actually incredibly involved and entail doing things like pulling in several different directions at once." She replaced Mary with a man because it is, she says, generally men who make robots: "Men have been having children for a long time: machine children, robotic children. So it couldn't be a woman, it had to be a man."
She had in mind an icon that would be "historical before its time". Often her work seems to aspire to disturb our sense of chronology in this way, treating the future as history, looking forwards as though we are looking back. It's appropriate on this count that she is representing Ireland in Venice in a year that has, courtesy of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, an inescapably futuristic ring to it.
While Grace Weir will exhibit an extraordinary, disorientating video installation, involving a pair of opposed large screens, a work that leaves the viewer literally in the clouds, Hapaska is still deciding what to do for the Biennale, though she has some ambitious ideas.
"The space we have is an old Franciscan Friary, so I'd like to reference the specific qualities that it has," she says. "When I've done big shows in largish spaces, I've tried to make an environment."
Following on from her Christmas tree, she would like to install "an upended pine forest" suspended from the ceiling. "The trees would be bare, but the ground would be covered with a carpet of leaves. That's by way of creating an atmosphere, though, a setting in which I could situate other pieces."
On of these might be another robotic figure, again a tragic robot, this time lying stretched out on the ground.
"I had this idea," she says. "It is animated, but not in the usual robotic way. You know how we expect robots to move in this jerky, awkward way? Instead, it might be capable of just one exquisite gesture, one very flowing movement, like just raising an arm and flexing its fingers."
She thinks about this for a moment, then adds: "The main thing is to make it as poetic and beautiful as possible."
Siobhan Hapaska's exhibition can be seen at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin until February 10th
