NINE artists, 31 pieces, and two rooms feature in the Roe Valley Arts Centre's latest exhibition. The nine are Sinead Smyth, Pascal Thomas Trabac, Andy Smith, Mary Crowley, Jes McSparron, Una Roe Doherty, Kevin O'Neill, Philip McFadden, and Kevin McLaughlin - collectively, the Inishowen Rural Arts Network. It is an exciting exhibition, vigorous and full of variety. The materials and media used may differ, and there's no common thread in the subject matter, but what you do see here is the artists' passionate engagement with the world around them.
The work is of a high quality, but there are pieces that stand out for me.
I love Sinead Smyth's oil paintings, particularly Grianan Lights. This is a bold and dramatic piece, with intense arrays of colours that blend, bash, whisper, and shout. It contrasts nicely with the delicate stillness of Andy Smith's photographs. He has a lovely appreciation of light, evident in Loved, in which a newborn rests against its mother, the shadow of its head falling across the brightness of her breast: rest; repose; protection; pure love; trust.
Smyth's colours work too alongside the bleached clarity of Kevin McLaughlin's pieces, which brilliantly hold permanence and transience within the same frame.
Una Doherty Roe presents four pieces - small studies, almost like nature under a microscope. Her textures and colours are rich and beautiful, and her concern with her natural surroundings is expressed with a delicacy and respect.
There's tremendous texture throughout the exhibition. Kevin O'Neill's Shipwreck finds and changes materials - nails, spikes, wires, cracked layers - to create a sculpture that's both balanced and tense. I think his Saw Vase is a wonderful piece, an altered and reoriented arrangement of ordinary tools, creating a spiky beauty.
This is an exhibition of changing tone and volume. It's playful, serious, brash, tender, forthright, subtle, aggressive. More than anything, it's always honest. They've packed a lot into the two rooms, and these artists mean what they say. This is a show that's well worth seeing. *Nine, an exhibition of work by the Inishowen Rural Arts Network, runs at the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre, Limavady, until October 25. Dominic Kearney