Beachcomber charm

The natural bric-α-brac that crowds our window-sills leaves little room for fussy housekeeping. From time to time, shamed by its patina of museum dust and cobwebs, I take it all down, hoover the sand away, and even wash a few things, gently, as with delicate china, reviving the violet-and-rose of a sea urchin's globe, the gleam of a seabird's bill.

Most of these objects were picked up at the tide-line, that shifting aperture on ocean life and death where skulls, carapaces, shells, worm-tubes, things forged of calcium and carbon, make a defiant landfall, their fragile irreducibility a part of their charm for the beachcomber.

After that, perhaps, the wonder at nature's creating, quite by the way, colours, textures and forms that fill us with delight. There seems no functional reason the global skeleton of a sea urchin, normally quite hidden by its spines, should glow with such radiant hues (or why, for that matter, so many deep-sea creatures are brilliantly scarlet and yellow at depths which filter just those wavelengths from the sunlight). Yet the colours of the bigger urchins, plus their exquisite proportion and five-fold geometry, make them some of the most satisfying structures in nature, at once seamed and seamless.

The worm-tubes I speak of shelter colonies of minute animals at the sea-bed. They extrude their homes in a swirling, brilliant white on flat surfaces of stones that, later, in storms, get lifted ashore in the clasp of kelp. The sun reveals them as calligraphers, cameo-carvers, Old Wedgwood potters, the Italian stuccodores of Georgian ceilings - whatever one's culture calls to mind. In the same associative way, a vertebral disc from a Risso's dolphin, with its intricate radial engraving, can demand to be worn on a fine chain: an ivory medallion for a druid.

The beauty of drift-objects can be inherent or referential ("like" or "as if"). It takes an artist to make connections that brought you to the tide's edge in the first place, to pace the thin, dark line between sand and wave. Even in the unnatural calm of a city-centre art gallery, the magical bone boats of sculptor Alan Counihan must reach far into the urban imagination, searching out whatever is left of its animistic soul.

I first met this remarkable Dubliner on the wind-swept terraces of Kilcummin Head, on Mayo's north coast, chipping at great stone slabs with a mason's hammer and chisel. This was his original trade, learned in part while labouring on Charles Haughey's home on Inishvickillane. Now, to the same, deep sea-sounds, he was shaping stone to build "a holy place" on the cliff. This sheltering gable of a sanctuary, pierced by a passage for the wind, was his contribution to T∅r Sβile, the sculpture trail spaced out between Killala and the tip of the Mullet peninsula.

Another of his stone sanctuaries, couched in mountain bedrock above a bay at Allihies, Co Cork, appears in the (which finishes tomorrow in the Temple Bar Gallery). There are pictures, too, of some of his big organic works, such as the rough-husked "fruit" of granite, with polished beach stones at its heart, that stands outside the civic offices in Greystones, Co Wicklow.

After the large, hard-hewn forms of this public sculpture, both here and in the US, the toy-like structures of his new bone boats come as an intimate revelation. Crafted from bones and feathers gathered on long, lonely walks round Achill Island, they are held together by tiny pegs and horsehair and the spring of one bone against another; above all, by an almost shamanistic vision of them whole.

Even a zoologist might be hard pressed to trace all their skeletal sources. Dolphins, sheep and seabirds offer sternums, ribs, wingbones, backbones, feathers, to build vessels poised on tiptoe, ready to fly. Counihan spent many months rowing a currach in the Blaskets, and the dancing buoyancy of his boats is keeled in a fine illusion of seaworthiness; spirits crowd out of a mythic past to set sail behind a gannet's beak or the fanged skull of a stoat.

As he trudged the eroding shores of Achill, he came upon a litter of very old, iron-stained, human bones, including a skull in two halves, scattered among beach stones and sea-wrack. With no one rushing to bless their burial, he carried them high into the hills, fitting them at last into a niche of rock perched above bog and forest. His photograph of the broken skull as "vessel of the imagination", gilded by a failing sun and cupping empty air, is a richly meditative image.

Meanwhile, lichens crust the slabs of "Tearmon na Gaoithe" ("the wind house" as locals prefer) on its perch above the waves at Kilcummin. It is certainly one of the most successful and popular of the 14 land-art sculptures of the T∅r Sβile trail, completed in a hectic "symposium" in the summer of 1993. The sculptors had just three weeks, with local helpers and even mechanical diggers, to realise on the ground what had started as sketches on paper. The atmosphere was that of a meitheal, the work-gathering of Mayo tradition, but one spiced with accents from Japan, Denmark, Germany and America.

The works, spaced out along some 80 kilometres of coast and moorland to either side of CΘide Fields, have immense variety, each project inspired by the site itself. Thus, limestone sheep graze gently beside the river at Bellanaboy bridge, but the bare sweep of hill above Blacksod was given the dramatic, granite henge it seemed to need.

The continuing community involvement in T∅r Sβile (even to the donation of land) made it easier to hope that the trail would achieve the essential durability of its brief, free of neglect or obstruction, and this, with the help of F┴S, has been bringing a welcome trickle of tourists to many out-of-the-way corners.