There was more than a touch of gallows humour about the invitation to Cecily Brennan's exhibition Bandaged Heart at Taylor Galleries. It featured an image of two Suicide Bracelets, broad stainless steel bands heavily scored with cut marks and inscribed with the mottoes: "Don't do it" and "Not today anyway." In the event, this sardonic one-day-at-a-time tone was a useful primer for what was to come. If nothing else in the show projects quite so bleak an outlook, it's still pretty strong stuff.
It consists of a small number of stainless steel sculptures and many small-scale tempera on gesso paintings. The title piece is exactly what it says on the packet: a big, generous heart, tenderly wrapped, and it sets the ambivalent, precariously therapeutic tone that characterises most of the work. The images, based on - you could almost say transcribed from - medical documentary photographs, record various kinds of damage inflicted on bodies and the processes of repair: gashes, burns, grafts, stitches and other more arcane injuries and procedures. The relevant body part is isolated in each case, like a specimen.
Despite the nature of much of the imagery, there is a dry, technical quality to all this, suggesting a view of the body as a living material, but predominantly a material that can be damaged and repaired.
It can be made good again, but not quite as good as new, or so a certain disjointed appearance, a lack of organic seamlessness, common to many of the images, implies.
While the paintings detail, fairly dispassionately and even-handedly, these processes of both injury and repair, the sculptures, which draw on similar imagery, enter into another, non-materialist realm. The point about the bracelets is that the steel bears the brunt of the violence, literally and figuratively, armour for the mind more than the body. They are amulets, there to ward off injury, to preserve and protect.
The same might apply to Hinge-ons for Bad Days, hollow steel leg casts like shin guards, bearing graphic evidence of drastic repair. In a way what is striking about all this is that the risk is not presented as some remote possibility but as omnipresent and everyday. The work situates us at a point of extremity, as, indeed, it should, given that it would be more than a little immoral to invoke such life and death issues ironically. Through her careful choice and use of materials, Brennan pursues ideas relating to the vulnerability and durability of flesh. Stainless steel has a flesh-like fluidity allied to extra-human strength. Gesso is a delicate, painstakingly formed skin of plaster which forms a ground for tempera pigment. Yet, in the end, as the overall, extremely effective installation plan, and the sculptures particularly, indicate, she is referring to questions of will, spirit and purpose. It's not for the fainthearted, but it's powerful stuff.
Michael Boran is a consistently interesting photographic artist who has never settled complacently into one stylistic niche. Peak, at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, is a particularly good, accomplished show. The title refers to the idea of a commanding point of view, literally and figuratively, from where the eye can explore and edit the landscape at will. Boran treats the notion wittily, with a study, for example, of what looks like a heap of building sand, symmetrically positioned between the imposing stone walls of a building that has been allowed fall into dilapidation: the old making way for the new. The peak here - the apex of sand - might be the lofty height of arrogant development, and the overall image is more than the sum of its parts.
Another photograph, of a stack of logs, numerals neatly scored onto their ends, presumably intended as markers for a nature trail but currently piled in random disorder, nicely undercuts the conceit of packaging and ordering the landscape for recreation. If all this sounds a bit didactic, it is not really so, and the major part of the exhibition is not at all so, consisting as it does of beautiful studies of landscape details in Spain (with just the occasional piece of sleight of hand, as with one repeated, inverted image). The dried-out terrain, orderly terraces and neat planting makes for meditations on culture and nature in an unforced, easygoing way. But a real love of the landscape also comes through. In most of the images, Boran knocks off the sharp edges we associate with photography, so that the surfaces have a soft, textural continuity that is, for want of a better word, painterly.
The spare paintings in Ita Freeney's Strata, at the Paul Kane Gallery, do not suggest strata in the conventional sense of the term so much as radical distillations of land or seascape. The discipline of the flat horizon line orders the compositions into expanses above and below. Nothing else much is allowed to intrude, though further subdivisions of horizontal bands are presumably the clue to the show's title. Yet these strata seem to be meant in the sense of foreground, middle ground and background, a series of stacked recessive spaces.
Freeney is trying to balance an equation that involves minimal form on one side and convincing presence on the other. It's not an easy thing to do and she is not always successful. But a respectable proportion of her paintings do make it, recalling aspects of the work of artists who have worked in a broadly similar vein, including Simon English, Mary Averill Gillan and the smeared paint effects of Gerhard Richter, without being merely or even derivative.
