Making it all look simple in Galway

The artists showing at this year’s Galway Arts Festival displayed a skill for taking complex ideas and presenting them in accessible, thought-provoking ways

GALWAY'S ABSOLUT Festival Gallery, nestled in the busy shopping centre on the Headford Road, is a remarkable success. It accommodates not only the festival's fine large-scale centrepiece exhibition, Hughie O'Donoghue's The Road, but also four other shows, all demanding their own distinctive spaces. The most extensive of these is a showcase featuring the work of Irish makers, originally seen in New York last year. Material Poetry, curated by Brian Kennedy, focuses on "poetic simplicity and material honesty". The latter is there for sure, though "poetic complexity" might be a better description.

It’s not just that it takes complexity to arrive at apparent simplicity, which on the whole it does, it’s also that furniture by Joseph Walsh and Yaffe Mays (Rebecca Yaffe with Laura Mays) looks distinctly complicated without being at all fussy.

Ditto Joe Hogan's basket forms and Karl Harron's glass bowls. Mays also features in Modern Languages, which considers contemporary reinterpretations of traditional craft, at the Galway City Museum. Nao Matsunaga is a highlight in that show. Both exhibitions are veritable inventories of relishable natural materials, even before you get to the skills applied to them. They are also craft shows, rightly presented side by side with all manner of fine art practices.

Back at the Festival Gallery, those practices include multi-talented Scottish artist-composer-musician-choreographer Billy Cowie. His Tango de Soledadis a terrific piece of work. A stereoscopic video installation, featuring the athletic Amy Hollingsworth performing a solo tango against a background, and a literal ground, drawn by Silke Mansholt. 3D glasses put the life-sized dancer solidly into the drawn, room-sized space in front of you. Everything about it is perfectly judged.

Cause Collective's Truth Booth,configured as a big cartoon talk bubble, invites visitors to respond to the question: "What is the Truth?" There's more audience participation with Paul Maye's Fictional Portraits. Initially plausible-looking portrait snaps become, on closer inspection, a bit unsettling. Visitors are invited to sit for a photograph, but elements of their image will be incorporated in a composite image of a fictional though disturbingly real-looking person.

In We Are Playing at Being Explorersat the Galway Arts Centre, Stephen Brandes, Andrew Dodds and Sonia Shiel play with our perceptions of time and space, "fact and fiction, real and fake". That's a fairly broad brief, as outlined by curator Maeve Mulrenan. The show comes close to being a Brandes solo, bookended by contributions from the other two artists. Certainly there's ample content to comprise a solo show by him, and a very good, coherent one.

Several of his big, representational drawings on sheets of vinyl floor covering are displayed to great effect in the handsome gallery spaces. Brandes, originally from Wolverhampton, is inspired by his family history to relate stories of trans-European migration, chance, identity and the oddity of human dreams and schemes. He uses comic-book and other pop cultural idioms but opens up the narrative and stylistic structures to leave things open-ended and quizzical.

Shiel makes deceptively knockabout versions of such serious artefacts as a classical oil painting and a propeller-driven monoplane. Deceptive because she's actually a deadpan virtuoso, whose skill is directed towards not calling attention to itself. All the more reason to look carefully at her work. Andrew Dodds's Alive! is the outcome of a participatory project. It consists of an imagined soundtrack for a notional horror film and invites us to project our own meanings onto the space it creates.

At NUI Galway's Bank of Ireland Theatre, Aideen Barry's Possessionprefaces a startling performance film with a set of related coloured drawings that work collectively almost as a storyboard. The female protagonist in the film is "possessed or haunted", not by anything supernatural but by the pressure to live within and conform to a set of social and personal conventions. Her obsessiveness both reflects and is a desperate response to the unreasonable demands imposed by those conventions.

It is an outstanding, potentially very disturbing work in which the everyday world becomes a threatening force.

Out at Salthill, in the Norman Villa Gallery, Jay Murphy discovers her own, unlikely version of Monet's waterlily garden at Givenchy. It's not a garden, but the dam and related hydroelectric works at Ardnacrusha. This landmark engineering project was famously documented by Sean Keating as it was being constructed in the 1920s. Murphy's Hydroconsists of a body of pastels and paintings of Ardnacrusha as it is now. Not, in other words, a heroic feat of nation-building. What she discovers is a fascinating interplay between the straight lines of technological architecture and natural substances and processes.

Recurrently in her thoughtfully observed views, the fluid and amorphous meets the imposed geometry of concrete and steel and, curiously, the result is not conflict but a time-worn, weathered convergence and co-existence. It’s a great idea for a body of work, and it’s beautifully achieved and displayed.

Dublin's Monster Truck Studios meet Galway's Engage Studios in Vis-á-Visat the Niland Gallery and the result is a really good show. Eight artists take part. Of particular note are Angela O'Brien's architectonic monochrome paintings, Lesley Ann O'Connell's deconstruction of a family photograph album, Ann Maria Healy's performative photographs and Ella Burke's gritty allegorical sculpture, The Fall, in which a dolphin skeleton plunges towards an inflated inner tyre tube.

The Kenny Gallery's Nude: Blatant Exhibitionism?is a mixed bag, and a crowded one, with going on for 140 works packed in. Among the less predictable highlights are Jennifer Cunningham's sensitively observed drawing and watercolour, Italian illustrator Mario Sughi's psychologically charged figure studies, Bob Quinn's photographs and Marja van Kampen's lushly coloured compositions.

Also well worth seeing are Lamb in Connemaraat the Galway City Museum, exploring Charles Lamb's sometimes romanticised view of life in the West, Lorg printmakers – including Sioban Piercy – at the University Hospital and 126 Gallery's day-by-day project, 14-5=126, in which nine artists each devote a day to an evolving artwork. It does bring to mind the old definition of a camel as a horse designed by a committee.

We also saw . . .

THE DEVIL’S SPINE BAND

“Weird or what?” exclaimed one audience member during an early, quieter moment in The Devil’s Spine Band, which opened in the Radisson Blu on Wednesday night.

It had a promising mix: Olwen Fouéré’s presence, a blues band, an Alice Maher set, the Japanese butoh dancers Gyohei Zaitsu and Maki Watanabe, and the intriguing set-up of butoh mixed with the Wild West and blues-rock.

In the end, it really depended on appetites. If you were in the mood for good ol’ boy blues mixed with writhing dance, obtuse passages, saloon lampoons and nudity, then it was for you. Indeed, some of the audience reacted warmly to the show when it ended.

But it proved all too baffling or tedious for several, with a smattering of walkouts beginning after about an hour. “Did you understand that?” asked someone when it was all over.

DINOSAUR PETTING ZOO

There were some kids who reacted to the delightfully realistic dinosaur by bursting into tears and begging to be rescued by their parents, but on each day that the Dinosaur Petting Zoo’s wonderful creation wended its way from Eyre Square and down Shop Street, it brought a Pied Piper-like cavalcade of delighted kids with it.