WATERFORD'S DYEHOUSE GALLERY was situated in Mary Street for a time, and another commercial gallery, handily named The Mary Street Gallery, opened there last November. It currently features an extremely likeable show, Road trip, by Clare Scott. In 48 small-scale paintings (including 10 in panoramic format), she documents a solo journey in the United States undertaken in 2006. She begins and ends at Dublin Airport, beginning with a 4am view of her room at The Clarion Hotel and concluding with a view of the airport itself. What's particularly engaging about the work is her matter-of-factness. She records the ordinary as well as the spectacular, paying due attention to rumpled beds in nondescript motel rooms, the condiments arranged on the tables in "drive-thru restaurants" and the inside of the laundrette in San Luis Obispo. She does the standard tourist things, including visiting Alcatraz in San Francisco, and checking out dinosaur footprints and Monument Valley in Arizona. She is alert to what is considered conventionally beautiful and remarkable, but also to what is beautiful in the everyday sense, in details of out environment that are utilitarian and virtually invisible. The result is a personal journal in visual form, a direct and unpretentious narrative that is cumulatively engaging. She notes that the trip was "a kind of escape", a bid to "flee in order to regroup". Each painting is like snapshot, each slows down our gaze, bidding us to follow the artist's considered attention to things. Perhaps that is why the mood is so affirmative. What might have been formulaic becomes intensely personal and meditative, and encourages us to look at the world with a greater patience and appreciation.