Gail Ritchie: Underling , 2002, colour pencil, 40 x 30 cm; courtesy the artist

It may seem like a narrow specialty, but Gail Ritchie has made an intriguing virtue of the imagery of dead animals through a stream of gothic images often rendered with the allure and precision of scientific illustrations - say, delicate watercolours of road kill or mummified cat corpses; or the three seven-foot-high charcoal drawings (now in the Crawford collection) of dead pigeons in various stages of dessication and decay.

If that sounds hideous, Ritchie's latest menagerie, Pelt , is most aesthetic: richly coloured pencil drawings on paper of bygone lady's fur wear: from fur coats and mink stoles to furry little fox-knots and pony-hair posies.

These antique heirlooms are weird enough in themselves, but Ritchie's jamais vu treatment creates an alternative zoology. Replete with dried paws, claws, snouts and ears, her animal forms are unnaturally dramatised in deeply suggestive folds and orificial involucres. The effect ranges from the poignance of little gimlet eyes to faint menace; erotic suggestion to dead-pan humour.

Gail Ritchie: Brethren , 2002, colour pencil, 50 x 70 cm; courtesy the artist

Brethren , for example, depicts two coiled foxes, blindly confronting each other like furry handcuffs. Underling is an abstract creature, like a perverse, three-legged foxtrot. Ream presents two animals stitched together into a mutant species, a two-headed mink with two tails and six legs.

Gail Ritchie: Ream , 2002, colour pencil, 82 x 114 cm; courtesy the artist

Fur and the female form step forth in Mother , a regal life-size fur coat which, hung at human height as in the Belltable, you could nearly walk into, like the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's Narnia tale. It's quite a momentous piece, although it suffers from being drawn over three sheets of paper, as though to suggest something sundered. Another biggish piece, Enfold , depicts the back of a tawny-orange coat, rumpling off the shoulder like a well-fed big cat glamorously shedding its skin.

Gail Ritchie: Enfold , 2002, colour pencil, 70 x 25 cm; courtesy the artist

Ostiole and Lacuna , meanwhile, are hats with hair patterns spiralling into clefts, for all the world like anatomically correct vulvas. And one wouldn't need to be Benny Hill to spot the Magrittish slap of Measured - a self-portrait with two fur flowers staring from where nipples ought to be, while cut off at the bottom of the frame is the vertical gash of an everted fur bag.

Gail Ritchie: Measured, 2002, colour pencil, 70 x 50 cm; courtesy the artist;

Fur has long been a surrealist's tool, and Ritchie pushes the innuendo towards hardcore fetishism. Halter depicts a mink noose - again, threatening auto-erotic asphyxiation as much as vengeance - while Strappado , a forlornly kinky piece in bleached yellow, shows a human head smothered in fur and Sellotaped up with catgut. [ Strappado is the classic torture of tying someone's arms behind their back and dropping them from a height, to dislocate the shoulder-sockets.] Fur, it seems, is a postfeminist, polysexually perverse issue, spiced with the horrors of animal-rights extremists.

Gail Ritchie: Halter , 2002, colour pencil, 70 x 25 cm; courtesy the artist

Beautiful and grotesque - with their luxuriantly obsessive detail, and oft-hyperrealist colour harmonies - these images tour the outer margins of our views of animals - from bluntest utilitarianism through fear to para-mystical veneration. Ritchie's beasts resemble ethnographic objects in their afterlife; graven images of minor divinities, mutilated for fashion, profit or indeed art. Pieces like Roan - a shaggy little pony-skin bag - may invite comparisons with Alice Maher, but these are rawer, original, ideational illustrations for all manner of wildly speculative animal tales.

Mic Moroney is a writer and critic.

Gail Ritchie: Pelt, Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, November/December 2002