Visual Arts:Fox Wedding, Mimi Kato, Ballina Arts Centre, Barrett Street, Ballina until Sept 1 096-73593 Cetorhinus Maximus, Abha Teangai Studios, Dooagh, Achill Island, until Aug 28 098-43414; Emerging Artists (and some old friends), Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition, King House, Boyle Finished Aug 11
Foxes loom large in Japanese folklore, and Mimi Kato's exhibition at the Ballina Arts Centre, Fox Wedding, draws not only the mythological role of the fox but also other creatures. In some stories fox spirits assume human form and hapless individuals find, belatedly, that they have married them, not always to their dissatisfaction. The term fox wedding, Kato explains, is used to describe sunshine through rain - a sun-shower - when it seems that nature is in a slightly different mode than usual and there's a bit of magic in the air.
In the three-screen performance video that gives her show its title, she presents a fox wedding procession making its way from right to left, playfully negotiating its way across each screen and the spaces between, before disappearing, like a dream vision. Wearing traditional animal masks and garbed in her own costumes, Kato is an agile physical performer and plays every part, weaving her way through space with dance-like movements that are both angular and sinuous, while the sound of heavy rain permeates the space.
She also features in a series of related photographic pieces that make up the balance of the show, embodying different animal spirits. Digitally created backgrounds evoke classical Japanese screen painting and fabric design. Although they are in a sense monsters, Kato's creatures are decidedly non-threatening. While they are derived from a pre-modern time, when demons were conjured out of the darkness and helped to make sense of a big bad world, she presents them in a variety of contemporary situations, and that is largely the point of her work.
In losing these old stories and the customs and superstitions underpinning them, she suggests, we have also lost some essential knowledge of our place in the world. If you knew what was good for you, you kept these spirits happy, but what kept them happy was, she feels, good for everyone. In her photographic tableaux she introduces various animal spirits to such contemporary activities as recreational sports and visiting the recycling centre. She has a light touch - it is an exhibition that children would certainly enjoy - but never at the expense of trivialising the import of what she's saying. Her work is elegantly made and genuinely thought-provoking.
CETORHINUS MAXIMUS at the Abha Teangai Studios in Dooagh is the fifth exhibition by the Achill Artists' Group. Achill has played an important role in Irish visual art (Paul Henry's work was decisively shaped by his time there) and the basking shark, from which the show's title is taken, is closely associated with the island. When the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger first visited Achill over a century ago, it was a place of desperate, almost unbelievable poverty, and its transformation, very slowly at first and latterly very quickly, make it a microcosm of development in the West of Ireland generally, with all the ambivalent feelings that entails.
This makes it all the more important that the Achill Artists' Group exists at all and that it exhibits on the island, for Achill could easily be defined as being on the one hand a kind of heritage site and on the other a seasonal resort knocked sideways by unconstrained development, rather than a living, evolving community.
Sculptor John McHugh, born and based in the centre of Dooagh, deals directly with the legacy of the island's past. Previously he was probably best-known for constructed geometric abstract sculptures, so his pieces here mark quite a departure.
Each is a vertical, three-part composite. Irregular shards of rubble and concrete masonry are recovered from demolished houses and the pier. They form rugged bases for bog deal pedestals, atop which are mounted rusted fragments of farm machinery and other implements abandoned over time. McHugh brings to the shaping of these elements a rigorous formal aesthetic and they are beautifully judged. Each is like a monument to the island's past, but each is also full of a sense of inventive possibility and levity, so there is nothing maudlin or elegiac about them; they are as much about the future.
Margaret Morrison is known for her lush paintings of natural growth, often counterpointed by the idea of dryness or drought - think of a desert oasis. Her current work maintains a luxuriance of colour but is more sparing in its imagery, focusing on individual plants, all locally visible, and offering us episodic accounts of growth, flowering and decay, all indicated against nutritive, creamy grounds. Margo McNulty's layered photo-engravings explore the idea of mapping and suggest the many unknowable layers of individual human histories that go into the formation of a place.
Willem van Goor, who arrived on the island about 10 years ago, makes meticulously observed accounts of ordinary aspects of Achill with quiet precision. Ronan Halpin's sculptures draw on a range of associations with great fluency and wit, opening up endless interpretative possibilities; Amanda MacMahon's intensely coloured paintings address the nature of change in the West with brio; Mary Lavelle Burke's seascapes evoke the endlessly changing atmospherics of the Western light and, finally, Camille Souter, Achill's most illustrious artistic resident, shows two small works.
This year's Boyle Arts Festival Exhibition Emerging Artists (and some old friends) was accurately described by its title. It actually featured a lively selection of work by emerging and fully emerged artists. All of the following showed really fine work: Ronnie Hughes, Alan Keane, Gillian Lawler, Sinéad Ní Mhaonaigh, John Noel Smith, Barrie Cooke, Blaise Drummond, Sahoko Blake's shoreline studies, Diana Copperwhite, Jonathan Hunter, Willie Herron, Lynn Foster Fitzgerald, Bridget Flannery, K.K. Godsee, Pat Harris, Mary Lohan, Nick Miller, Tadhg McSweeney, Philip Moss, Elizabeth Le Jeune, Stephen Loughman, Bongi MacDermott, Amy O'Riordan, Patrick O'Reilly, James O'Connor and Mark O'Kelly.
That is, by any standard, a formidable list in terms of range and quality. As with the RHA Annual, the show is always fairly crowded, so that most work can hardly be seen to its best advantage. But on the other hand one gets to see an enormous amount of work in a short space of time. And one of the virtues of the annual Boyle exhibition is its staunch independence from any curatorial orthodoxy.
You never know who is going to turn up there, which is refreshing.
It's true as well that the exhibition sells very well, not only because of the growing and very impressive Civic Collection but also because a significant number of private buyers regards it as a good opportunity to see new work by artists they collect.
