Reviewed:Things to Make & Do, Stories of Displacement, Work of the Devil, and Daniel Lipstein and David O'Kane

Things to Make & Do, Blaise Drummond. Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen's Green, Dublin Tues-Sat noon-6pm Until July 7 01-6708055

Stories of Displacement, Ciaran Healy; Work of the Devil, Eilis Murphy.

Galway Arts Centre, 47 Dominick Street Until July 7 091-565886

Daniel Lipstein and David O'Kane.

The Studio, 36 Leeson Close, Dublin 2 Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat-Sun 2pm-6pm Ends June 24

Not for nothing is Blaise Drummond's Rubicon Gallery show titled Things to Make & Do. His work is fragmentary, open-ended and speculative, qualities typified in the central piece, which takes up a wall to itself: 47 Things to do with Art and Architecture (Rezé). The Rezé in question is the location of one of Le Corbusier's radically modernist communal building projects, the Unités, based on the model of the vertical garden city. Drummond worked in one of these, La Maison Radieuse, close to Nantes. One can see that for him it was a perfect opportunity to further his exploration of the relationship between modernist utopian projects and nature.

How better to do so than from within the heart of just such a project? Scepticism about the viability of the natural is always there in the background in Drummond's work. Nature has, from the first, been co-opted into human schemes and visions. One of the constituent pieces of the 47 Things is a postcard of an archetypal Caspar David Friedrich landscape, in which nature itself is invested with religious and nationalistic symbolism. A tree isn't just a tree but is emblematic of enduring faith and national unity. One of the smaller pieces in the show, For Everything that Lives is Holy, plays on such variously constructed ideas of nature, viewing grass as the embodiment of diametrically opposite viewpoints: intelligent design and genetic manipulation.

The desire to interpret nature as bolstering or confirming various aspects of our essentially human preoccupations runs deep, and it is but one of the issues that gives Drummond pause for thought. Others include the impulses to categorise, control and change it. Recreation and conservation are also pathways to artifice and distortion. While a sizeable subsection of contemporary art is concerned to present critiques of various discredited aspects of modernism, Drummond doesn't really fit into it. Rather than going after paper tigers, his position is more problematic, more ambivalent. He seems particularly inclined to wonder just how we should align ourselves with what we persist in thinking of as the natural world, even though our merest approach alters any real prospect of there being such a thing as nature. As noted, his work is open-ended. It doesn't offer definitive answers, but it does imply that the natural, however compromised, is still crucial to postmodernity and is, so to speak, part of what we are.

AT THE GALWAY Arts Centre, Ciara Healy uses bird imagery to explore ideas of home, travel and belonging, in Stories of Displacement. Her show begins with the print of an accidentally multiply-exposed family snapshot. Temporal displacement counterparts physical displacement, family histories of individuals heading abroad, becoming absent presences. Cabinets packed with memorabilia, tokens of what was, of people no longer there. But, echoing the truism that "wherever you are, that's where you are", Healy seems to suggest that we are all in some sense in-between.

Here she takes flight into bird metaphors. The nest is a powerful image of home, domesticity and belonging, but in Intertwined Identities (Native, Migrant, Hybrid), she points to the elusive nature of birds, despite our desire to pin them down, figuratively speaking, and her water-coloured polaroids, In Between, and her photographs, Baby Birds, allude to the transitory nature of home and nests alike. Healy equates our efforts to fix family presences and identities ritually within given cultural codes with our taxonomic ambitions in relation to birdlife. In both cases, the reality is something more elusive and indefinable, she implies.

This is one line of interpretation of her work. In practice, it is nothing as dogmatic, allowing several readings, and functioning more than satisfactorily on several levels. She has a felicitous touch with material, skilfully bringing together various media and techniques.

She shares the Arts Centre with Eilis Murphy, whose Work of the Devil looks at diabolical imagery from medieval woodcuts. Transposing the personification of evil into workaday contemporary settings, she may be suggesting that our apprehension of evil has been swamped by a tide of all-too-real diabolical imagery. Her work is well-made within its limits, but doesn't quite find a compelling form.

THE STUDIO FEATURES work by the two recipients of the CAP Foundation Awards 2006, Daniel Lipstein and David O'Kane. The awards go to NCAD graduates and provide them with a studio space for 12 months, a stipend, and an exhibition at the conclusion of their studio residency. The two artists are quite different in their aims and preoccupations, but they share some common ground as well. Both make relatively traditional representational images imbued with a sense of magic or fantasy.

There is a consciously allegorical quality to Lipstein's paintings. They are densely worked landscapes with an odd luminosity - that is to say, a kind of inner radiance rather than a naturalistic light. Part of their dense surface textures turns out to consist of handwritten text, adding to their revelatory, visionary air.

In fact, Lipstein notes that many of them were inspired by time spent in Norway many years ago, one of those periods in life that have a particular, magical impact. That sense of wonder is what he goes for, and he does manage to convey a dreamlike intensity. What he lacks is any lightness of touch, however, in terms of palette or texture or mark-making, and the paintings have a laboured, illustrative character.

Magic is relevant to O'Kane's work as well, though in a more mischievous, subversive way. He is forever undercutting any notion of the real, first positing and then dispensing with apparently straight-laced representations. Like the earliest cinematographers, he relishes film's ability to cheat the mechanics of perception in his video animations. He cites Baudrillard, the cultural theorist who argued that we live increasingly in a world of simulacra, of depthless signs, remote from any imagined reality. O'Kane develops a coherent body of motifs, from the idea of a prototypical metaphysical interior to the use of paper as a symbol of knowledge, inquiry and representation. His paintings are intriguing but can appear overly rushed or cursory in execution.