A magician's tricks revealed

The late Patrick Heron maintained that painters influence the way we see the world and, true enough, drive west from Cork towards Skibbereen and chances are you'll be looking through William Crozier-tinted glasses. His highly coloured landscapes, which might at first glance seem unlikely, are borne out by masses of orange montbretia, often growing through deep red fuchsia, with the occasional burst of electric-blue hydrangea or brilliant gorse, big yellow fields of cut grass, purple stone and umpteen shades of green, all touched by a dancing, vibrant light.

It's appropriate that in such a setting the West Cork Arts Centre in Skibbereen ran an exhibition called Living Landscape annually for 10 years. For most of those years an artist acted as selector and curator of a group exhibition of contemporary landscape painting. Then, in 1996, it was decided that Living Landscape had run its course. The question of whether it would have a successor seemed to be resolved last year when the centre came up with another variation on the idea of an artist-curated show. Painter Charles Tyrrell, based in Allihies, was given a free hand to choose work that was personally significant to him. He built an exhibition from just nine pieces of work.

There is a particular interest in seeing what an artist will opt for under such circumstances. We inevitably look for clues as to their own influences, but we won't necessarily find any. This year, the task fell to sculptor Vivienne Roche, and she too has gone for a tight selection. Her show, Objects in Time: Artefacts, Artists, includes just eight sculptures, by herself and four other artists of her own generation.

It is inspired by something that almost amounts to a sculptors' trade secret - (sculptors rather than artists generally, because it seems truer of them) - that is, their fascination with, and attachment to certain talismanic objects. These objects have one thing in common: they are not works of art, or they are not defined as such. That is, while they are in many cases likely to be artefacts - and there may be great art in their making - by and large you'll find them in archaeological and ethnographic rather than fine art museums. They may not be shaped by human hand at all. Roche cites Henry Moore's collection of "stones and bones" and observes that: "The examples of artists involved in a fascinated meditation on a particular corpus of artefacts are endless."

For her part, an encounter with early Scandinavian culture was surprisingly important for her own sculpture - surprisingly, because the objects that interested and inspired her were not at all the sort of forms with which you'd have associated her work up to that point. Since then they have certainly found their way in, for, as she writes, such objects contribute to the development of "a personal iconography". Another, related strand of her own iconography is her use of bells.

Here she includes one, a small version of her public sculpture, St Patrick's Bell/Liberty Bell, together with a photograph of the bell that inspired it, a small bronze bell, beautifully inscribed with the word "Patrici", which is in the National Museum. She liked its crisp, contemporary form and what she sees as its female lines. The other piece of her own work that she includes also involves gendering objects, in this case a pair of early Viking stirrups she saw in a Stockholm Museum. In Vendel Pair, the stirrups become a couple, one male, one female.

Another National Museum exhibit is recalled, an extraordinary little gold boat complete with mast and oars from the Broighter hoard. Kathy Prendergast's Night Ship, a rough bronze vessel held aloft by its own oars, is similar enough to its nominal source to qualify as a variation on it, but she does translate it brilliantly into an image of her own, giving it a final spin with a title suggesting sleep and dreams. Eilis O'Connell's drawing of a helmet from the British Museum is even more straightforward. She liked the patina and, she candidly admits, "drawing it is a way of possessing it". She was also struck by its breast-like shape, which seemed appropriately protective.

The link isn't always so direct. O'Connell's other piece, in the form of a rusted steel shelf from which two cones are suspended, has a more complex relationship "to African carvings of the female body". She is precise about which carvings, citing pieces in Paris and Zurich, and includes another that she owns herself. Her piece, with its conical "breasts", picks up on an almost geometric stylisation of form, a feeling for rough materials and the fetishistic nature of some African carving.

Alice Maher's Dome of Forgetfulness has as its "familiar" one of those tiny ornaments that you shake to generate a miniature snowstorm. But she also cites larger Victorian glass-covered displays of flowers or wax fruit. Her glass dome encloses an implausibly jagged mountain range cast in bronze, a little landscape of the mind. Perhaps there is another source. Immediately west of Caher, her home town, the Galty Mountains erupt dramatically from the vales of Tipperary.

The remaining exhibitor, Maud Cotter, mentions a rather exotic source of inspiration: white marble carvings of the limbs of Queen Victoria's children, commissioned as keepsakes when they were in their infancy. Creepily or endearingly, depending on your inclination, the marble limbs are exhibited on black velvet cushions under glass domes. Cotter's response is delicate and poetic. In Cumulus, a black rubber cushion, dusted with French chalk, is surmounted by a glass dome that traps only air, an image as ambiguous and oddly evocative as Prendergast's Night Ship.

Following on the heels of the jam-packed annual Members' Exhibition, Objects in Time is certainly sparse. The first room features the sources with explanatory notes, leading on to the works themselves, which have no problem asserting themselves in the generous space, though they are generally small and hardly feature colour at all. Roche might have given away a trade secret but the process of doing so is likely to prove thoroughly engrossing for anyone who wonders how artists come up with ideas and, strikingly, while the conjurer might have explained the trick, she's taken away none of the magic.

Objects in Time: Objects, Artefacts is at the West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen until September 11th