“Will I show it to you the right way up,” offers Clare Cashman as we peer through the dimness at a version of one of her images projected onto one a great, hinged wall at The Studio. It is a tempting offer, but maybe let’s just leave the photograph as it is for the moment. Let’s just luxuriate for a little longer in that seductive, almost hypnotic sense of disorientation that looking into the artist’s Cork landscape provides.

The landscape, a half-flooded patch of land near Macroom, has produced a rather uncertain image in the artist’s hands, not least because of the way in which Cashman chooses to exhibit many of her images: ‘upside down’. But even those photographs that do not, in her opinion, require re-orientation prior to display, such as the images of sky and clouds taken through an aeroplane window, offer some of the same sense of sorts of confusion, a reeling, unfamiliar blend of nature and imagination, the substantial and the insubstantial.

The central image of this hybrid is the reflection, a kind of “virtual” image of our world, even if the artists runs shy of that term, associated as it is with computers, goggles and various other strap on impediments. But if she eschews technical manipulation, simply displaying reflections falls short of drawing the kind of attention she requires viewers to pay to the otherworldly spaces she is busy capturing. The virtual world Cashman frames in reflections in lakes, seas and puddles, dotted with trees, grasses and hedgerows are best revealed, it turns out, when her images are hung in the opposite way from their original orientation.

Once this simple inversion has been effected, reflections turn out to be at least as significant, at least as palpable, as that which they reflect. Now, suddenly they conjure up, reveal even, visions of another modality, an alternative construction of space, a space we cannot physically enter, but one which, all the same, proffers some kind of invitation to us.

So, as it seems only polite to decline the offer to change the picture’s orientation once more, we continue to stare at this picture, struggling to decode its forms and somehow make sense of the fact that this landscape exists.

But though the image leaves us certain we are contemplating a somewhere that exists, there is an equally pronounced sensation that we are peering into an imagined space. We know that landscapes exist in combinations of familiar forms, patches of grass, trees, bushes, water, sky reflection and to that extent Cashman’s image seems to represent a real place: all the elements are present and recognisable. But the business of putting these parts together, like pieces in a bewildering jigsaw – or even a drawing by MC Escher – is not an easy reflex as much a vertiginous struggle. All at once, the act of looking that we feel so natural becomes misted in a haze of negative cross-checks and failed comparisons.

“I think the puzzle aspect is important,” says Cashman. “Because it is important to grab somebody’s attention, to draw them into the space, have them imagine the space. I am interesting in having people absorbed into the space, and one way of doing that is making them curious, offering them a challenge in what they are seeing…”

For Cashman, the absorption she speaks about relates to bringing viewers to inhabit alternative, imagined spaces, alternative ways of looking at the world around them. All the same, she is adamant that she is not contributing anything approaching a definite understanding. What she has to offer instead is simply an approach to looking. “I’m certainly not dictating anything, resolving or solving anything, just offering a place for the imagination to get engaged.”

Her images, whether photographs of the sea, cloudscapes seen from above or monochrome canvases, meddle with the notion of perspective, working against the idea of monocular perspective, vanishing points and all the troublesome baggage that goes with them.

Instead, Cashman’s art contents itself with beginning to conjure up some of the sensation of being in a landscape, the sensations of apprehending space in general.

The work tracks the sensations of restless looking, of rapid re-composition and recalculation, that moving through the visible world inspires. Cashman’s two dimensional images, in short, investigate everything that is absent from two dimensional images. Given the ongoing nature of this uroborosian pursuit, it is hardly surprising that Cashman’s work is far more concerned with provoking this productive restlessness than in recreating an artificial sense of things snapping into place around a single point in the landscape.

Looking at these images has far more to do with recreating the frantic heaves of living perception than creating a sense of the order of nature.

But if Cashman is not interested in imposing a sense of order on the natural world, her choice of nature scenes – although not exclusive – gives further hints at the project.

Luke Clancy (2003)