Ronnie Hughes's most recent paintings conjure up a deliberately ambiguous world. In them, a family of simple, intriguing forms - lozenges, doughnuts, figures-of-eight, spirals, chain-links - are arranged against calm, even soothing backgrounds. The muted colours include many greys, creamy or buttery yellows, soft greens and blues: nothing jarring. The pictures are laid-back and good humoured, subtle and painterly. They could be depictions of microscopic organisms, or fossils, or, to make a leap in scale, of astronomical phenomena.

In fact, when Hughes began making them he was, he observes, thinking of things like toasters, coffee beans, pills, remote control buttons: "things to do with consumerism." They came after he managed to work his way out of an 18-month impasse. "I knew what I didn't want, but not what I did want. I tried everything. I had a really terrible time and I was actually quite desperate. Then one day I got two paintings I was working on separately and joined them together. Within three or four days I had produced something new and I just felt, yeah, that's it, that's what I want to do." The break-through painting is called Espresso Mundo, and it is included in his exhibition at the Model Arts Centre, Sligo, Painting 1992-97. It and its companions are described as "The Sligo Paintings," not because they are descriptive of the celebrated local landscape, but for the simple reason that they were made after Hughes's move there in 1995. Born in Belfast in 1965, he's one of a generation of Northern artists who have grown up with The Troubles. Unlike some of his peers, he doesn't directly address them in his work, though his childhood experiences probably did shape a concern with identity that has been a preoccupation.

"When I was seven we moved to Bangor, to a vast housing estate almost entirely populated by mixed-marriage families who, like us, had been moved from Belfast. The idea was that it was a more neutral environment. In fact now it's very much a Loyalist estate, though it wasn't like that when I was growing up." The earliest painting in the show coincides with a year-long residency he was awarded in New York. Being there prompted him to make "paintings about Ireland as seen from New York." An image of people queuing for US immigration control is juxtaposed with one of livestock marshalled and tagged for export. In his double-edged installation, Consummation, an array of beer bottles, their labels over-painted with postcard images of Ireland, suggest both the sentimentality of exile and the perception of the Irish abroad.

Back in Belfast, he was struck by the phenomenal changes in the city. "Buildings were going up everywhere. It was all about projecting the illusion of normality, but things were not normal." He inserted photo-realistic images of pristine new buildings into the centre of ruggedly layered textural paintings. Subsequently his Dublin paintings continued the theme of layers, suggesting a city continually remaking itself through a frenetic level of activity.

He'd moved to Dublin with his partner, Eva, whom he'd met in New York. As a Northerner, it took him some time to adjust. "When people hear your accent, often the first thing they want to talk about is Northern politics. As the child of a mixed marriage, I was brought up never to talk about politics or to identify myself in any way. It took me a long time to get over that." In 1994 he was awarded a 10-week residency at the Banff Arts Centre in Canada. "It was thematic: `The End of Nation States.' I found that I was one of just a few painters. The other 40 or so people were either making installations or using digital technology - which was then incorporated in installations. It's a peculiar situation to be in. You know, you almost have a guilt complex about painting. But a funny thing happened. People started to come up and respond very positively to what I was doing, to the process of painting itself, as though they'd forgotten." More and more he was looking to the process itself to generate meaning, rather than projecting content onto the work. "I felt that I didn't want to be too explicit in terms of imagery. I don't think it's particularly healthy to say: `This is my opinion and now I'm going to spell it out in this artwork.' Better to learn about your own attitudes through the process. And I was looking for a way of working that would allow me to do that."

Then he took a part-time teaching job in Sligo RTC. After six unsatisfactory months spent travelling between Sligo and Dublin, he and Eva decided they had to opt for one or the other. "We planned to give it a year and then see how we felt. After six months neither of us thought we'd stay. By the end of the year we knew we really liked it." The crux in his work came because he found that, for various reasons, the kind of pictures he had been making in Dublin just didn't make sense in the context of Sligo. Then came the long barren patch that eventually spawned Espresso Mundo. He hasn't looked back since.

"It was the first time I'd just let rip and tried to work on pure instinct. I had no idea what I was doing, so that was really exciting. The problem is, of course, that it's become more difficult now. The potential moves are more predictable. But, funnily enough, the most recent piece here had a few surprises even for me, so I think something unpredictable is starting to happen there."

Ronnie Hughes: Paintings 1992-97 continues at the Model Arts Centre, Sligo until August 2.