The end-of-year graduation exhibition is not only an art school fixture, it's an essential rite of passage. And because of the changing nature of the art world over the last two decades, it's also something else. These days, it seems as if art is subject to the same dynamics as rock music. Stars are created overnight, and they're getting younger all the time. When Saatchi does the rounds of student shows and buys in bulk, the art world sits up and takes notice. Next Sunday, the 1998 Degree Exhibitions opens to the public for a week at the RHA Gallagher Gallery in Ely Place and at NCAD Thomas Street. Two days later, in a new departure, an exhibition featuring three of the NCAD's MA students opens at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery.

The strength of the NCAD shows is their diversity. New technologies rub shoulders with old. Boundaries between disciplines are permeable. As Director Noel Sheridan notes: "NCAD does not have a house style."

There is no house style. But there are patterns. Sculpture, for example, has long settled down into a succession of theatrical installations in cubicles. And you do notice habitual tactics. One is duplication. As in: don't just run your video on a monitor, run it on four, five, six monitors. There's a comparable use of the grid. One small image may not look like much, 60 arranged in a regular grid automatically acquire a certain presence.

Which is not to say that these devices don't have a legitimate role. Catherine Lyons, for example, has an extremely effective video installation about suburban life and the nature of community. A plush armchair stands before three televisions screening extremely well-crafted drama vignettes.

Then there's Anne Daly's inventory of her grandmother's house and, in a sense, life. It's presented as a grid of images and texts: ornaments and utensils isolated against a neutral background and anecdotal snippets, which together pack a real emotional punch. Equally, Katy Simpson's work depends on the accumulated impressions of a succession of fragmentary, oblique images, any of which would be unremarkable on its own. If not a style, what about a house theme? The nearest thing to a dominant concern is probably the self, often with the body as reference and focus. Virtually all this work is made by women and it mostly explores issues and areas of experience relating to women. Prime in this regard is Abigail O'Brien's impressive MA show, another stage in her series on sacraments. Here she takes on Confession and Communion. Impeccably made colour photographs show herself and her mother baking in a suspiciously pristine, state-of-the-art kitchen. It's all done with the care and precision of Poussin, whose paintings were the starting point of the series.

Amanda Coogan's documented performances, which call for a fantastic degree of mental and physical commitment, and her video pieces, recall Marina Abramovic's art of discomfort and endurance.

In a small courtyard garden in Thomas Street, MA student Marilyn Lennon has made a striking sculptural installation with a series of spine-like etiolated forms in bone-coloured ceramic that function as a metaphor for the impact of pollution on the natural world.

Using chiefly a collection of teats from baby bottles, Helen Killane has a chilling installation on the absolute imperatives of appetite, collating the infant's unconditional hunger with the eventual emptiness of the addict's blind need. Julie Robinson's avowedly self-obsessed, autobiographical work defies categorisation. Her tiny, beautifully made and fanatically detailed drawings are somewhere between medical diagrams and sinister toys. They draw you completely into their world. Breda Jack- son's video also draws you into its - visceral - world, via a red-carpeted tunnel entrance, then projects you on a helter-skelter voyage as if you are within the body. Charlotte Phillips has a witty, inventive installation-as-self-portrait.

Veronica Dooley uses her own body to make marks in a way not unrelated to Janine Antoni. There is a very physical, choreographic grace and energy to her prints. Starting from the way we animalise emotions, Shauna Bailey comes up with a striking merged image of woman and horse. Breda Flanagan's ambitious installation is a vivid account of the quick-fix, Prozac-nation mentality.

In the midst of a preponderance of content-driven work, it's almost a surprise to encounter a couple of really interesting abstract painters, but there are at least two. Robbie O'Halloran shows real flair for handling materials, for choosing and combining colours, and for building up compositions in layers. Christina Poole shows a very assured quintet of paintings. In terms of composition their quintet's closest exemplar is Richard Diebenkorn, but they have a provocative colour sense and a quality of touch that are all Poole's own.

Several exhibits refer specifically to experiences of transience, mortality and loss. To take one example, Fiona Kerbey's MA show, Descansos. Her assemblages of small-scale, consummately delicate porcelain pieces are reminiscent of Marie Foley's sculpture without directly resembling it. Their delicacy addresses the fragility of memories and other residual traces.

Others who make an impact are two MAs, Aidan Linehan and Donncha MacGabhann, plus Mary Duignan, Michiko Kanzawa, Emily Strange, Stephen Dunne, Eamonn Tuite, Colm Laighneach, Frances Mezzetti Duggan and Garret Barry. But there are 59 fine art degree students exhibiting, and it's impossible to do justice to all of their work here.

Not all of it is brilliant. Inevitably, some things just don't work out. But if you make the effort of getting to the shows, the degree of commitment you're getting from the exhibitors is extraordinary.

The NCAD Fine Art Faculty Degree Exhibition Runs from Sunday to Sunday, June 14th