Visual Arts: In Fields Of Vision, at the Taylor Galleries, Maria Simonds-Gooding addresses the elemental human connection with the land. That is, in terms of habitation, cultivation and husbandry, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed: Maria Simonds-Gooding: Fields Of Vision, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, until September 25th (01-6766055)

David Crone: Recent Paintings, Hillsboro Fine Art, Dublin, until September 25th (01-6777905)

Susan MacWilliam: Headbox, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, until October 9th (01-6710073)

In her plaster works, carborundum prints and tapestries, the basic unit of form is often the field. The act of defining a field - establishing, building and maintaining a boundary - comes across as difficult and robustly physical, but it is also imbued with something like a mystical, magical quality.

For much of the time Simonds-Gooding is based in a remote part of the Dingle peninsula, in Co Kerry, where the evidence of just such a relationship is inscribed directly on the landscape and where there is a vivid sense of something else that comes across in her work: the feeling of being a tiny speck in the immensity of nature.

Nature, here, encompasses time. Simonds-Gooding's time scale is closer to geological than human. Her habitations are islands in space and time, hewn from the land and preserved through hard labour.

They are also prized and cherished. Boundaries, pathways and water courses have a sacredness to them, as though they are miraculous - as, one can readily acknowledge, they are. Over the years Simonds-Gooding has intermittently pared down her pictorial vocabulary to just a few forms and lines. She is exceptionally spare with this body of work. It is striking that she uses the paleness of the plaster as the basic, heightened space her compositions occupy. She does not specify a landscape as regards place names. Oddly enough, though, while the dryness and light of the material seem more closely related to the Mediterranean or India than to Co Kerry, they work in relation to Kerry. They connect with the place.

It's interesting to see her use of simple iconographic markings in relation to the recent show of Aboriginal art in Carlow, where each landscape is a concise compendium of narrative and practical information. There is, perhaps, a new boldness and deliberation in many of her plaster works, which are not quite whimsical but do display a lightness of mood that militates against any tendency towards solemnity.

Her excursion into tapestry makes a lot of sense: the steady, incremental rhythm of the process and the dense, even textures marry perfectly with her concerns. The term "carborundum prints" is almost a misnomer, as the works themselves, on hand-made Indian paper, have a sculptural presence and weight. And one large plaster piece, Vegetation And Dwelling Place, is exceptional.

David Crone's exhibition at Hillsboro Fine Art is a bit of a treat, and not only because he hasn't shown in Dublin for several years. He is what one might call a canny painter, quietly observant and astute, highly regarded by his peers but without the public profile his work deserves. Not that he is neglected, particularly. Many seasoned collectors value his work very highly, for example.

Although it is not explicitly stated, his current work draws on his rural garden for material. As Crone has retired as a lecturer in painting at the college of art in Belfast, this might sound like a predictable development. The relaxed pursuit of pastoral themes. Far from it. Not to deny his felicitous instinct for texture and colour, but Crone's paintings and works on paper are never easy or comfortable. They are always prickly and engaged, always function on several levels simultaneously and full of ideas.

Here the garden is his subject matter but in a speculative, analytical way rather than in a picturesque sense. One could think of the garden as a metaphor for painting itself or for other culturally demarcated arenas and activities. In the past Crone has been drawn to the city street or shop windows in a similar way.

Seed Heads marshals a range of plants gone to seed. Along the base of the painting Crone explores the morphology of individual plant structures like a taxonomist. The surface of each painting is left deliberately inconclusive, built up through a process of give and take. There is the overall conceptual space of the painting, but that space is not a classical, coherent, illusionistic space. It allows for adjuncts and alternatives, opening up other possibilities and digressions.

This quality is related to the pace of the paintings, which is considered, even meditative. Crone likes a muted, murky tonality that gives his colour a quality of simmering energy, and both paintings and works on paper display a lovely, offhand use of line in describing stems and clustered forms.

Susan MacWilliam's stark, austere installation at Temple Bar Gallery, called Headbox, is another product of her fascination with perception and paranormal phenomena. This time she has converted the gallery into a kind of laboratory. Sets of functional plywood paraphernalia place us in the position of experimental subjects. As an experience it's disquieting and even perplexing. She captures the feeling of being objects of inquiry and scrutiny.

All of the objects concern the case of the Russian woman, Rosa Kuleshova, who attracted the attention of researchers in the 1960s because of her apparent ability to read with her fingertips. Scientists came up with a number of devices to prevent Kuleshova using her eyes in a series of experiments designed to establish whether she could really see with her fingers.

MacWilliam incorporates a video in which a subject takes the position of Kuleshova, putting her arms through openings in a plywood screen and deftly cutting out images of herself, following the contours and equipping her cut-outs, Blue Peter-style, with paper versions of the real-life experimental paraphernalia, including a huge collar.

Is there an implication here that experiments find what they want to find? As we step into Kuleshova's shoes, so to speak, in situations of confinement, MacWilliam provides an audio background that subtly underscores a sense of isolation. She is more interested in the experimental process than the idea of veracity. But her installation brings to mind a landmark experiment in which scientists grafted a gene encoded with instructions for making an eye onto the leg of a fruit fly. The fruit fly duly grew an eye on its leg.