Breaking Rainbows review: equal parts gently imaginative and conceptually woolly

Breaking Rainbows ★★★
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

"There's art in the doing," reflects a visual-artist-turned-shepherd, during an exhausting account of lambing season, in Orla Barry's autobiographically infused performance. How to find the art in animal husbandry is the challenge behind this installation piece of amusing vignettes, charmingly performed by Einat Tuchman and Derrick Devine upon a 300kg mound of Lleyn sheeps' wool (Barry clearly gets a lot of material out of her flock), where the order of scenes is decided at random, by audience members selecting titles from a box.

At an auction, Tuchman describes negotiating the “masculine vibe” of the breeders and traders in her efforts to acquire a ram, while Devine, wide-eyed and similarly attired in silver spandex pants, plays the ram with an understandable sense of indignity. “Can you believe this?” he asks, following the kind of inspection most of us would leave until a third date.

Barry will return to this combination of documentary detail and anthropomorphic fancy, but elsewhere her sequences pursue a range of techniques. A dreamlike division between her roles as shepherd and artist is described in a breathlessly gothic tone. The fable of a man who falls in love with a magically transformed cat just about slips free from bestial undertones to make playful points about our immutable nature (his wife still chases mice). And between sung sequences that make allusions to ancient rituals, or prolonged, warping recitations that come off merely as vocal exercises, there is a recurring theme about bleating conformity in the face of ecological disaster, political anxieties or lifestyle consumerism. At times it is neatly woven, but too often it is rammed home.

Asking for discipline in the dramaturgy may be beside the point, though: ideas and expressions have been pointedly herded together. But running at half an hour longer than advertised, to no apparent benefit, the project will become as woolly as the set, and it doesn’t seem coincidental that among the details of trading, rearing and lambing, Barry has nothing to say about shearing. Still, aided by a forthcoming visual exhibition and video installation, it makes for a gentle and imaginative rendering of lived experience.