Crawford Degree Show/ Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork: The Crawford degree show has a reputation for students' taking a multidisciplinary approach to their work, and this year's exhibition is no exception, particularly in the work of the students of printmaking.
The title of one of Andreas Voss's exhibits - The Room Of Torture - is not far off the mark. Bundles of tangled videotape pulled from stacks of cassettes sit on the floor. The tape has photocopied images of naked women imposed on it. This is followed by Connection, which features a chair with shearing blades fitted to a very delicate place.
Far more subtle and unsettling statements are being made next door by Sarah-Jane Lynagh, whose bold and sumptuous photographs have a quasi-religious element, through their female subjects' composure in suffering.
Miriam Walsh's vortex of suspended newspapers incorporating video projection evoke "shock and awe"; Mary Ginnifer's fabric sculpture Fuchsia Vessels inspires its own quiet sense of awe.
Video works also feature with painters. Bridget O'Gorman's piece, projected onto a Wendy house, has impinging fairy tales disturb the slumber; Aine Ní Chiobhain's piece lets us view through a peephole the late-night journey of a deserted train.
Irene Sheehy and Helena Tobin are both preoccupied with interiors. The former's sharply coloured geometric patterns open up space and play with perspective. The latter's images of sterile corridors and stairways seem to condense space, creating a sense of oppressive menace broken only by a lurid red door. Raffaele Cappieri's paintings seethe with energy and colour. Eamonn O'Ceallachain's canvases incorporate other elements, such as photos, and have a smouldering quality.
High-quality ceramic work has long been produced at the Crawford. Some works have an extra resonance, ranging from the meditative works of Anu Lehikko and Noirin O'Connor's reverential exploration of family memories to Linda Rice's enigmatic iconographic plates and Donna Coffey's buckled images of ocean liners and suspension bridges - not forgetting the kitsch playfulness of Lucia Parle, who recreates a living area of 1950s domesticity.
Runs until Saturday
Don O'Mahony
Bonnie Raitt
Olympia Theatre, Dublin
There was a time, in the 1970s and early 1980s, when Bonnie Raitt was in danger of losing herself to drink and drugs and her music to the dictates of her then record company.
Her background in authentic folk and blues in the late 1960s had given way to an emollient fusion of country blues and mellow-mafia soft rock. It wasn't until the mid-1980s, when her record company dropped her, that she
started to get her act and her life together.
That she is now regarded as one of the finest slide guitarists around, and pronounced by blues aficionados to be a female Eric Clapton, is a
testament to her tenacity and resourcefulness. She graced the Olympia stage with a litheness of presence and style that appeared to be the result of years of playing gigs and paying her dues.
There was no barrier between artist and audience, and if her sole flaw was steadfastly ignoring calls for certain songs you'd guess it was due to her linear frame of mind and nothing else.
Whippet thin and witch haired - that Morticia-like lightning-white streak in her hair is both spooky and sensual, and adds to her lean, mean guitar-toting image - Raitt rattled through songs old, familiar and moderately new.
Some were adjuncts to the band and were less than interesting. Others, such as Have A Heart, Silver Lining, Nick Of Time and You were textbook examples of how to blend slow-burning, seeping blues with a languorous pop sensibility.
Ultimately, however, Raitt's performance simmered instead of sizzled. You wonder what she'd be like unplugged in a venue half the size. Some time soon, perhaps?
Tony Clayton-Lea
Eric Sweeney
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
The Secret Rose - Eric Sweeney. Annum Per Annum - Arvo Pärt. Adventus - Eric Sweeney. La Nativité (exc) - Messiaen. Pari Intervallo - Arvo Pärt. Le Cercle De Lumière - Eric Sweeney
The multifaceted Eric Sweeney is probably better known these days as a composer and academic - he is head of music at Waterford Institute of Technology - than as a performer. His programme for this organ recital was unusual, offering three works of his own, plus two by Arvo Pärt and two movements - Le Verbe and Les Enfants De Dieu - from Messiaen's La
Nativité.
As a composer Sweeney has absorbed minimalist techniques and shows a fondness for using them in non-minimalist settings. His Cercle De Lumière (1999) is a sort of extended rondo, sandwiching Philip Glass-like rocking patterns between sections that evoke French toccata style. French showpieces come to mind also in the playful-sounding Adventus (1998), and minimalist patterns dominate The Secret Rose (2002).
What all three pieces have in common is a tendency to fold in on themselves rather than extend or develop the processes they establish. The result is a low-tension, even simplistic-sounding music.
The fact that on this occasion it didn't always seem to justify the lengths to which the composer stretches it may have had something to do with the composer's performing style. His playing of Messiaen and Pärt tended too much towards the static, the Messiaen sounding monolithic, the Pärt far from sharp enough in outline. Even the regularly recurring rests were almost squeezed out of the picture in Sweeney's reading of Pari Intervallo.
It was an evening of distinctive but not quite persuasive music-making.
Michael Dervan