Whisper Concrete

Butler Gallery, The Castle, Kilkenny Daily 10am-1pm/ 2-5.30pm Until May 1 butlergallery.com 056-7761106

The “whisper” in Mairéad O’hEocha’s title is a noun rather than a verb, indicating a kind of concrete, one that at least partly absorbs traffic noise instead of bouncing it into a landscape broken up by Ireland’s arterial road network. O’hEocha studied at the NCAD and at Goldsmith’s College in London and is now based in Dublin, but she also lectures at Wexford Campus School of Art in Carlow, which entails a commute that led to this body of work.

In a cool, nuanced, technically polished way, O’hEocha paints landscapes, those many-layered landscapes visible in passing from roads and motorways that bypass rural communities and one-off dwellings. Her interest in “the specifics of place” translates, in her own case, to the southeast, a region particularly rich in its layered history.

In describing composites of antiquity and modernity, locality and universality, stillness and relentless motion, the artist conveys a sense of landscape and locality as unstable, transient, in a sense indefinable and, perhaps disturbingly, recognisable. (A related exhibition will be shown in Dublin at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, starting June 10th.)

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Michele Horrigan

The Belltable, Limerick Until May 27 061-315871