Four walls, two sides

Two travelled, politically-minded artists were left alone with four blank gallery walls for a month. Billy Leahy looks at the results

Maybe it's a grass-is-always-greener scenario, but NS Harsha got the raw deal. While Northern Irish artist Heather Allen was sampling the delights of his native India, and specifically flitting around his home city of Mysore, Harsha was coming to terms with the routines and dramas of daily life in Belfast and Portadown.

But before your eyes begin turning an envy-tinted green with thoughts of how great life must be for artists – what with all their jet-setting, fancy openings and what not – it is worth learning that for the last month, Harsha and Allen have been held under lock and key inside the gallery space of the Project Arts Centre.

The result of their travails is MURAL, a giant floor-to-ceiling work committed to the four walls of the space for the duration of the exhibition. The concept behind the show was to send the two politically-minded artists on a quasi-cultural exchange in order to digest a hugely different environment, and then for the pair to work collaboratively on an immense mural.

Both artists look to popular sources for the graphical inspiration for their work, with Harsha taking the modern Indian narrative tradition of Nandalal Bose as his starting point, creating images that draw from the colonial Company and Bazaar styles, Italian Primitivism, the Pahari miniature folios and Indian children's textbook illustrations.

Allen, who is known for her combination of the image with language and literary sources, often frames her work within the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, referencing both personal and more general levels. The paramilitary iconography associated with the conflict in the North is a strong influence on Allen, who appropriates images from political and religious murals and almost parodies sectarian graffiti in her work.

For MURAL, Allen has created a boldly coloured work, heavy with motifs and fragmented references from her own cultural background, art history and symbols she encountered while in India – though the latter tend to be less obvious and understated. Allen seems to play with ideas of innocence and a darker reality, presenting us with cartoon images of a family of bunny-rabbits enjoying a picnic, which are then weighed down by crosses composed from their seemingly dead furry friends.

Elsewhere, a sun painted in bright yellow and orange hangs above a forceful drawing of a stag being savaged by two wild dogs. The Red hand of Ulster also makes an appearance, but the traditional coloration is doing battle with encroaching black paint, while a shamrock is emblazoned on the palm of the hand. These weighty images are permeated by chunks of touching text, with the line "...and Jesus Wept" reoccurring after its graffito-esque debut appearance just inside the gallery.

The visual and aesthetic crossover between the two artists is less pronounced than one might expect, with the physical border between the two perhaps too visible. But this probably has a lot to do with the hugely differing styles of Harsha and Allen, with the former creating drawings that seem light and ethereal when juxtaposed with the strong colours and often determinedly heavy hand of Allen.

Harsha returns again and again to the image of a red-brick house, gable always on view, as he produces idyllic scenes with a slightly disquieting undercurrent from time to time. Isobars and swirling pencil lines give his work a whimsical and lyrical feel as he creates multi-layered narratives that situate themselves somewhere between a daily reality and an imagined dreamscape. The rituals of life come under scrutiny, while elements of the religious and supernatural are obviously present.

The combined efforts of both artists result in an interesting transformation of the gallery and the language of the space, producing an intriguing exhibition. At times, however, the feeling that the diverse approaches of Harsha and Allen are incongruous does attempt to knock the show off balance, but the positive side of this is that it also goes a long way to highlight the separate talents of both.

?More Exhibition continues until 29 October. www.project.ie