In a darkened room you encounter a huge sphere of light (made of some kind of soft fabric), glowing from within. It fills the room; it, itself, is the source of light in the room. Sometimes it dims; sometimes it bursts with electric flashes, seemingly in sync with loud, unpredictable sounds that could be emanating from within it. It quivers slightly and seems to make a sort of breathing sound: a continuous, slowly repeated intake and expulsion of air. It is so large that it touches both the floor and the ceiling of the room. There is enough space for you to walk around it, enveloped in its outbursts of light and noise. You can touch it. At first you are not certain whether it is reacting to your presence in the room.

Top: Andrew Kearney, With Intent, installation shot; photo Studioworks, courtesy LCGA; Bottom: Andrew Kearney, With Intent5 installation shot; photo Jim Savage, courtesy LCGA

In an adjoining darkened room: a hole in the floor, covered by a metal grid, lets you see into a subterranean space beneath the gallery. It is suffused with a strong blue light. You have to crouch and crane your neck to see in. As you peer through the grid into this submerged domain you see (or at least I did when I looked) that it contains, amid the bric-a-brac of the basement, a number of small, black objects of differing sizes (simple balloons), huddled into a corner. They are moving slightly, jostling one another. They are pinned in their corner by the continuous activity of a number of large fans (such as might sit on an office desk) that are stationed on the basement floor. The fans relentlessly rotate their heads with a robotic indifference. The area of floor immediately in front of them is strewn with the dead skins of destroyed balloons. In the darkened room from which I am viewing this, two video projections mirror each other on opposite walls. They show superimposed, moving images of the artist's head and naked body - filmed in that same blue light, in that hidden, buried space beneath my feet.

Back in the daylight, in the spacious central room of the gallery the walls are decked from top to bottom with large, black digital counters, ticking up numbers. There seems to be an overwhelming presence of them, inexplicably and inexorably counting, counting, counting... They are lashed together with yards and yards of black, heavy-duty electric cable.

In another room what could almost be five large tombstones lean in the dark - rough, 8 x 4 plywood boards are propped in a line against the wall. Numerous circular openings, about the size of a fist, have been cut in the boards and through each hole is threaded an electric light bulb - most facing in to the wall, a few facing out. They blaze and fade unpredictably. They are reminiscent of stars. Thick, black electric cables once again run to each bulb. There is a profusion of cable; it trails from the back of the lights down the face of the boards and spews in waves of tangled black spaghetti onto the gallery floor. Only half-visible in the faltering light of the bulbs, atop of each board are large (about 4'x 2' 6") black-and-white photographs of a fallen tree in the process of being sawn up.

In yet another room, on the floor, several tiny monitors display a repeated image of the black balloons dancing in the invisible subterranean draughts of the basement. On the facing wall - high above the monitors on the floor - is a shelf on which stands a red, translucent perspex box - like a large fish tank - out of which emerges a milk-chocolate-coloured bust of what appears to be an eighteenth-century, bewigged aristocrat (I do not know who he is, or even if it is important to know). He gazes impassively into the empty air high above the monitors of silently dancing objects.

The exhibition is called With Intent and it is the work of Andrew Kearney; it occupies the ground floor galleries of the Limerick City Gallery of Art.

So, what does it all amount to, this repertory of bizarre performing objects? Is it just an arbitrary circus of phenomena: a collection of interesting and curious objects devised by the artist that are exhibited to be experienced by the viewer - like a firework show - a lot of activity, light and noise, but not signifying anything in particular? Or, are there other levels of meaning at work in this Theatre of Things? I don't know for sure. There is, undoubtedly, something going on akin to Leonardo making his entertainments for the Medicis: an object like the sphere seems to slip overwhelmingly into the realms of pure Spectacle. Indeed, one senses, throughout all the works, the artist's obvious delight in fabricating spectacle (and expensive spectacle at that). But, is there intentionally, given the exhibition's title, something else going on beyond this?

For my part, I have to say that I am haunted by the ominously claustrophobic image of the room filled with digital counters.

Absurdly, something haunts me too about the image of those pathetic balloons huddled - one could even say cowering - in that cellar. Despite the trivial and frivolous associations that might normally be attached to such insignificant objects, they succeed, surprisingly, in awakening much deeper and darker thoughts. (Whether the image I actually saw on the day was the artist's intended image, or whether it came about unexpectedly, by accident, I don't know.)

There is something powerfully elegiac too about the leaning boards with their constellations of averted lights and their images of the dismembering of the tree.

There is something silently threatening set up in the empty space that contains the relationship of that indifferent bust on its high shelf and the dancing multitudes on the monitors below.

Precise meaning or precise intent in respect of any of the pieces in this show is somewhat elusive, but most of the works do suggest speculative possibilities for meaning in terms of the outside world. It is work that on the whole provokes attempts at interpretation and incites a curiosity about its intent. In the end there is, I think, a serious and interesting artist at work here. Something is being spelled out - however cryptically - in these sometimes ominous and uneasy fireworks.

Samuel Walsh, Self-portrait, charcoal and conté on paper; photo Eoin Stephenson; courtesy Hunt Museum

Paul O'Reilly: Self-portrait, conté on paper and oil on paper; photo Eoin Stephenson

Under the banner of the Real Art Project, works by Julie Forrester were on show at the City Hall Gallery.

The installation/objects in this show are all constructed out of electrical wire, the thin, multi-coloured, plastic-coated type. In all but one of the pieces this is adorned with fistfuls of paper pulp, that have been squeezed onto the wire at various points and left to harden into negative casts of the squeezing hand - presumably the artist's own?

The first of the objects that you encounter on entering is in the middle of the gallery: it is a very large, loosely-woven basket or net made out of this electrical wire: a visually attractive object, about fifteen to twenty feet in diameter at its widest. It tapers from the ceiling to the floor. It is studded with the clenched, pulped-paper casts, which have been painted in autumnal ochres and oranges and grey (title: Gather).

Beyond it, at the far end of the gallery, numerous scrawny hanks of the multi-coloured wire have been hung across two rods suspended from the roof beams. The ends of the wire, festooned with the coloured pulp casts, dangle into the air on either side. Several fallen hanks coil loosely across the floor immediately below (title: Curing).

At the other end of the gallery the paper fist-casts are arranged into a long curving line on the floor; the electrical wire sprouts out of them like grass (title: Sown).

Nearby, but set apart from the line, stands the empty cocoon or shell of a life-size figure, woven once again out of the multi-coloured wire. An open side-slit, where (one could imagine that) the person over whom this object was formed may have exited, is (interestingly) clearly visible, giving it a certain frisson and direct human resonance that the other objects don't have. It has suggestions of a recently sloughed skin - and of a cage - and even of a nervous system (title: Husk). It is a very different object to any of the others.

The exhibition as a whole is called Nurture and a poem exploring that concept, presumably by the artist, is available. It seems to allude to the influence of the output of news and information media on nurture. There is also a short press release (I don't know who wrote it) which tells us that the work is made from the detritus of the mass media and telecommunications industries. We are told that the casts are made from pulped newspaper and that the wire is, significantly, "telecommunication wire." It goes on to say that, "In this body of work the concern is with the out-put and in-take of information, the relationship and compliance implicit between sender and receiver, provider and consumer."

Well, I don't think so. If, following the implications in the press release, someone tries to tell me that the wire net with its adornment of painted casts is some kind of image of the World Wide Web, I'll weep. Whatever the words in and around this exhibition speak about, the objects do something else. They may well be made out of newspaper and telecommunication wire, but they don't have anything to say with those materials about the media's effects on nurture, or about the compliance of senders and receivers. The figure piece apart, the objects in this show really seem to offer themselves primarily on an aesthetic and formal level, to be appreciated as things. While they visually link in loosely with their titles, they don't visually make statements and comments that go much beyond themselves. They were generated by a theme, but they don't comment on that theme. Which is all well and good. Within this domain they undoubtedly have a vibrant life and sometimes a quite powerful visual presence. Why then the flying buttresses of words (which even miss the structures they are supposed to be supporting)? Look at the objects - start there.

Julie Foste: Nurture: Curing, 2001, mixed-media, installation view; photo Jim Savage

The University of Limerick's National Self Portrait Collection is, as with all such collections, a mixed bag of curiosities and gems. A selection from it forms the basis of a small exhibition at the Hunt Museum, put together by the collection's curator Dr. John Logan. It is called As I See Myself. Twenty artists who have, or had, a direct connection with Limerick have been chosen and their self-portrait has been exhibited along with another piece of their work. The selection succeeds in presenting a lively juxtaposition of very different artists - running from the eighteenth century right up to the present day with, if anything, an emphasis on the contemporary contributors.

What struck me, as I moved around the works, was the range of sheer idiosyncrasy exhibited. The more contemporary artists, in contrast to their predecessors, have by-and-large ploughed their own very individual furrows in style and approach - almost eccentrically. The show, in its own small way, seemed to give a glimpse or a snapshot of the course of art history, as it has moved from a world of predominating Schools to the open-ended free-for-all of the present. I found its diversity interesting to engage with: whether I was examining one of David Lilburn's chaotic map/diaries, or a colourful and witty take on history painting by Jack Donovan, or the light/dark theatre of John Shinnors, or the idea-objects of Tom Fitzgerald, or a piece of conceptual mischief from Mike Fitzpatrick; I was confronted with strongly independent individuals. This trait is also carried over into how some of the artists approached their self-portraits, where a significant number of them have inventively sidestepped some of the clichés and conventions of Portraiture as a genre.

Co-incidentally, there is another exhibition on view in Limerick that has been drawn from a larger collection. This time the works come from the City Gallery of Art's Permanent Collection (which includes the National Collection of Contemporary Drawing). It is called See For Yourself. The selected works are on show in all the first-floor rooms of the gallery. It was curated by the artist/photographer Tom Shortt.

It is intended as an exhibition for young people and it attempts to engage its visitors thoughtfully with the works on view - hoping to entice them into the rest of this large collection, which is housed in one of the rooms on the ground floor. Over the duration of the show, which runs for a month and a half, a number of workshops/discussions for primary and secondary school teachers have also been organized.

As an exhibition the show is hung sparely: there seems to be a lot of blank white wall in the large rooms (apparently this has been done deliberately, in part because these works don't normally get such generous elbow room). Each piece on view is accompanied by a comment and questions - which are intended to spark the young imaginations into engagement with the works.

They didn't get me going.

It may be that the fairest review would actually be from a fourteen-year old; and it may be that this show will, in fact, succeed well in terms of its intentions, but I am afraid that I found its tone much too worthy and dry for my taste. The stated aims of the exhibition are perhaps admirable, and a lot of work has gone into Tom Shortt's illustrated booklet that accompanies it (and which is available for free, I might add), but I found the actual selection and display of the works ultimately puzzling and arbitrary. There did not seem to be any real focus or significant point to making that particular group of extractions from the larger collection; and it needed that kind of focus.

It is also perhaps worth making the point that, with the comments and questions affixed to the selected images, the last thing this show does is invite you to see for yourself; which makes it and its title something of a conundrum. I had a number of concerns about the words that surrounded these images, but in particular I found it worrying that in a list of "keywords" that are provided as a "communication guide" for visitors to the exhibition, under the key concept "Significance" Social, Political and Cultural were cited as relevant categories through which to consider the artworks - but not Personal. Why not? If you are going to do an 'educational' show aimed at exciting young people about the activity of art it has to be better than this.

That said, it had as its basis a public collection and public collections are tricky things - what you do with them is, no doubt, even trickier.

Walter Verling: Stacking Thatch, oil on board 31 x 41cm; Maam Turk Bog, oil on canvas board, 30 x 40cm; courtesy D+L Gallery

At the D+L Gallery (the new reincarnation of the Doswell Print Gallery) an exhibition of paintings by Walter Verling is on show. There are over thirty small paintings that visibly take delight in the light and colour of landscape. These modest, unassuming paintings celebrate the pleasures of seeing and the pleasures of the artist in his remaking of the world in paint. A love of the activity shines through the work. The best of them often have the directness of a sketch. Paul M. O'Reilly, in his brief introduction to the works, says of Verling that, "His work does not fit into any contemporary stylistic niche, and often mistakenly seems to belong to the academic/pretty picture school. It is far from it." In a way he's right. What you have here is that direct, spontaneous communication of someone pointing and saying to you: "Look at that!" This work is a million miles away from the cutting edge of fashions and trends, or anything that would obviously mark it out as having a pressing contemporary significance; but perhaps its relevance lies in its simple, honest intent: that one-to-one attempt at sharing something that was noticed.

Andrew Kearney; With Intent ; Limerick City Gallery of Art: September-December
Julie Forrester; Nurture ; Limerick City Hall: September/October
As I See Myself , The Hunt Museum: July-October 2001
See For Yourself : Limerick City Gallery of Art: September/October
Walter Verling: Newscapes , D+L Gallery, September/October.