FOR years a voluntary exile Fin Italy, Janet Mullarney has exhibited in Ireland relatively rarely, but her show at Project Arts Centre a few years ago left a definite impression on its viewers. Basically she works in wood, or rather she did the Sligo exhibition ranges about widely in every sense with frequent use of plaster and mixed media. It is rewarding, uneven and it takes risks.
The title, Squilibri Contenuti, gives a key of sorts; we are dealing with disequilibrium, being kept guessing and off balance. In Me Mind is Frazzled, a fairly orthodox female nude in wood (virtually lifesize) has a streaming mass of hair strung out behind her as though in a gale, and the hair is festooned with disparate objects. In another exhibit, given a small room to itself, a few small figures (and, animals figure throughout as much as people) huddling in a corner are dwarfed by a large, slightly sinister wall drawing. A woman sleeps beside an animal shape - perhaps an image of post coitum omne animal triste. A raven is a recurring image, and obviously has a quasi symbolic role in the artist's imagination.
Mullarney also makes a speciality of "boxes", often, standing rather unstably on stilt like wooden supports, which, when their lids are lifted, turn out to contain small objects, miniature sculptures. It is rather a pity, however, that the ingenuity is overshadowed by a certain effect of scrappiness - or is that the effect deliberately sought? Sculpture of this sort is almost automatically in danger of lapsing into the kind of conceptual clutter and whimsicality which was so familiar in the 1980s.
The invention, the ideas and the energy are obvious and well sustained though personally I would have liked more large, standing or hanging or flying pieces to flesh it out. Though the artist professes herself perfectly happy with it all, I felt here and there that, she had slightly misjudged the spaces available and that in some of the rooms the sculptures - which are virtually miniature dramas or scenarios - are spread just a little thin or seem slightly shrunken. After all, it is in large, free spreading, almost operatic ensembles that she shows herself at her strongest and most original.
