Fairy tales and hairy tails

Sooner rather than later as you look at Ana Maria Pacheco's sculptures, you find yourself drawn to the open mouths of her figures, with their prolific rows of vicious-looking teeth. Disproportionately small in the great, heavy wooden heads, they make up in savagery what they lack in size. Gleaming and sharp, they are the teeth of flesh-eaters. To emphasise the point, one big tableau features four suited, grinning figures sitting around the naked body of a fifth, lying prone on a table. It is called The Banquet.

Born in Brazil, Pacheco has been based in London since 1973 and is renowned for her carved and painted wood sculptures of big, figurative groups. Her exhibition is brilliantly installed in a vast, hangar-like factory at Loughboy on the outskirts of Kilkenny. The grotesque and sinister aspects of her work are enhanced by the dark, cavernous space, within which her sculptures and paintings are revealed in isolated pools of light.

This presentation perfectly echoes the artist's theatrical use of light and shade in the paintings. Thin glazes are applied to smooth surfaces. The paint is smeared rather than brushed on, giving the forms a fuzziness and adding to the way they glow, emergent against deep, dark backgrounds, burnished to a uniform sheen by a coat of wax.

A certain air of complicity between victims and oppressors in her work has been interpreted as suggesting a view of life as a theatre of cruelty, in which everyone haplessly plays their part. In this, her work recalls the fantastic allegories of Hieronymus Bosch. This isn't to dismiss the influence of Brazilian wood carvings and story-telling, from folk tales to magic realism. But she also draws freely, and eclectically, on Biblical and classical mythology and contemporary sources.

While all the sculptures are of male figures, female figures dominate the paintings. They are like fairy tales. In a way, they are fairy tales. All of her figures have something childish, even babyish about them, and seem partly inspired by the work of illustrators like Maurice Sendak. But if the individuals in the pictures are, as they appear, dressing up and playing, their games have the emotional intensity, the easy acceptance of fantasy and the raw capacity for affection and, more to the point, cruelty, that characterises the world of childhood. All of this is coloured by some of Pacheco's enduring preoccupations with decapitation, masks, subterfuge - and, of course, teeth.

At the Butler Gallery, American sculptor's Petah Coyne's show is called Fairy Tales. The chief material in this substantial and remarkably varied body of work is horse hair, woven, plaited and knotted. She uses it spread out on the floor, flat against the wall and in masses that echo and envelop such forms as penitential religious statues and stuffed birds. These works are assigned a bewildering set of titles which, it helps to know, encompass the nicknames Coyne and her siblings used as children, and the names of Japanese authors she reads and admires.

It is striking that she doesn't just use hair as a novelty material, but has learned how to employ it as a precise and versatile medium. There is a magical quality to the way familiar forms coalesce out of masses of hair. Coiled into ropes it explicitly recalls the story of Rapunzel, but much more as well. In labyrinthine heaps across the floor, it suggests snakes and, as Paula McCarthy pointed out in introducing the work, self-flagellation. Spread out against the wall like seaweed or fishing net, it snares and smothers birds.

This year, the festival reaches further afield with the consolidation of affiliated exhibitions elsewhere, notably Thomastown and Kells (that's Kells, Co Kilkenny), the sites of seriously ambitious enterprises. Kells Priory and its surroundings, including the King's River with two mills, makes a stunning setting, but that wouldn't be enough without the tactful and imaginative selection and siting that characterise the project. Last year's celebrity presence was Elizabeth Frink; this time it's Barry Flanagan, several of whose hares, including one 18-foot high monster, look thoroughly at home and are dramatically sited - one dancing its way across the weir.

But that's only part of the story. In all, there is work by 22 artists, including five stone carvings, Gravity Swimmers by Michael Quane (in the large mill), elegant, tapering ceramic columns by Francis Lamb, ceramic vessels tucked into recesses in the walls by Eileen Coates, beautiful black and gold vessel forms by Sonja Landweer, Martina Galvin's mirrored Jewel Box and Pauline O'Connell's symbolic act of using water power to generate light, comparable to Ann Mulrooney's elegant visualisation of a room in the priory as a charged, generative space.

The Grennan Mill Crafts School in Thomastown comfortably accommodates no less than three substantial one-person paintings shows. One is by a welcome visitor, Derbyshire-born Michael Porter. His paintings present us with a series of complex, dazzling surfaces, built up from sets of layered and overlapping textures, that keep us guessing. Passages of meticulous naturalistic painting coexist with very free abstraction, but the work is always tied to the real world, referring us to rock faces, water and vegetation. Colour is used sparingly but well, and he gets great mileage out of black, white and grey. He is technically ingenious and shows great skill in handling materials, but he never becomes a slave to technical effects and works like Cracks in Rock and Gwavas Lake 6 are startling and strangely beautiful images.

BERNADETTE Kiely's paintings are all of skies. But the sky becomes, for her, a repository for a huge range of feeling, a screen onto which everything can be projected. In a series of ambitiously large canvases she orchestrates huge masses of thickly textured, waxy pigment, building dark, thunderous peaks and vast, iridescent plains of cloud. Glowing sunsets are, of course, a picturesque cliche, but she takes a hackneyed image and reinvigorates it by expecting more of it, by insisting that it carry a burden of meaning, and her pictures have a forceful, soaring energy.

George Vaughan's Odyssey Series suggests not so much the peregrinations of Odysseus as the plight of Penelope, weaving and unweaving at home. The role of either protagonist serves as an appropriate metaphor for painting, when each canvas is a fresh start, but the problems remain the same. Vaughan evidently enjoys himself in exploring the possibilities here. His free, vigorous compositions recall aspects of the work of Nicholas de Stael and William Scott. Blocky, cell-like forms rearrange themselves from canvas to canvas, regulated by a fast, relaxed line, like Penelope's yarn, restlessly making and unmaking.

Artists at Freshford is a first venture into the north of the county. The venue is the beautifully restored and converted Upperwood Stableyard on the edge of the village, where there is a lively group show of work by a diverse cross-section of painters. Sally Smith's soft-textured River Bank sits comfortably with Brian Bourke's mellow landscapes; Lynne Foster Fitzgerald's intense, gestural figure is echoed in Paddy Graham's works on paper, Patricia Hurl's homage to the model, Eddie Cahill's stark heads and Brian Maguire's sympathetic study.

At Rudolf Heltzel, Paula Bastiaansen's porcelain pieces, derived from vessel forms, combine incredible delicacy with the extraordinary strength of a spiral or vortex shape. Meanwhile, a founding member of Kilkenny Arts Week, the prodigiously energetic Ramie Leahy, is showing paintings in two venues, works with natural history in a cave-like environment in Market Cross Shopping Centre, and in a large showroom space at the entrance to the car park, where his works record travels in the US and Cuba, among other places.

Elizabeth Cope's exhibition at Shankill Castle in Paulstown has become something of an annual fixture. Her own bright, exuberant paintings, plus two bronze figures, are accompanied by work by Maurice Quillinan and Alison Kennedy. His small, moody landscapes, still lifes and sculptures are solidly crafted, while Kennedy shows competent if sentimental studies of people and animals. Phoebe Cope also shows paintings, including an outstanding self-portrait.

Not part of the festival per se, though the festival provides a good opportunity to see it, is the Kilkenny Archaeological Society's exhibition John Comerford and the Portrait Miniature in Ireland at Rothe House. As a means of providing a small, portable likeness of a subject, the portrait miniature was completely displaced by the advent of the camera, but during its heyday it attracted a large number - up to 200 - of practitioners in Ireland, among them Kilkenny-born John Comerford, whose work forms the centrepiece of the show. The exhibition, and its excellent accompanying catalogue, represent a fascinating and pioneering account of an important strand of Irish art and social history.

Most Kilkenny Arts Festival exhibitions run until Sunday. Sculpture at Kells continues until August 24th; the Portrait Miniature continues until August 29th; and Petah Coyne until October 3rd