INTO the clean, whitewashed gallery at the South Tipperary Arts Centre, Amanda Coogan has introduced a menagerie of off-white objects, their yellowed creams and bruised orange colours immediately suggesting that something here has begun to fester.
Half blocking the entrance to the small gallery, Coogan has installed a pile of baby-sized "mattresses", constructed from chicken wire, covered with cotton, and stiffened with pastes and varnishes. Yellowed and teetering, these would-be resting places, remain unoccupied and unoccupiable, perhaps an accidental memorial to the passage of some plague, or equally plausibly, a celebration of genetic craving, a totem for a yet unborn tribe.
Above the mattresses, on the front wall of the gallery's small mezzanine, Coogan has fixed more empty vessels, this time small girls' garments, stiffened to hold the shapes of absent bodies, each floating gently above its own glowing light bulb, a flex apparently attempting to keep them tethered among the living.
These are, however, easily the most successful components of the show. At times, indeed, they offer too much contrast to the other, strongly derivative pieces of this uneven installation. Coogan is a young artist but this is her third solo show and there is a palpable sense of a body of work, often so busy assimilating that it forgets it has a job of its own to do.
Coogan is not nearly the first artist to use light sources and exposed wires in the highly-identifiable manner seen here, although there is no way of telling whether her inspiration comes from Andrew Kearney, Christian Boltanski or from some less obvious direction.
In a similar vein, the most common form found in this installation - a kind of udder, elongated so that its teats begin to take on a phallic dimension - is strongly reminiscent of an idea that Dorothy Cross has only recently left behind.
Even if Coogan has no interest in any of these artists, their existence cannot help but cast a shadow over her work, a shadow from which Coogan must show more ambition to escape.
