Texts - Bernadette Kiely

A Riverine World By Cristín Leach

in Essays
posted March 20, 2023

This city where I live was built on a once-natural riverine landscape. Eight channels or more of the River Lee winding to the sea, now hidden under streets. Riverine is a good word in the mouth. It rushes its sharp, tight opening before winding...

Bernadette Kiely evokes an isolation that has become routine.

in Essays
posted September 8, 2020

Kiely charts familiar landscapes transformed by time and chance. Read the full article here: Irish Times: Bernadette Kiely evokes an isolation that has become routine

I Never Think of the Future, it Comes Soon Enough

in Essays
posted March 6, 2020

Best known for her paintings of river and flooded landscapes based on the themes of the passage of time and the transient, fragile nature of the physical world, Bernadette Kiely’s references include landscape and environmental photography, contemporary and historical painting, geographical and historical landscape...

Finding Tenacity in Fragile Things

in Essays
posted March 1, 2019

Nobody tells you that it’s the objects that anchor you. Along the tributaries of bereavement, you will find yourself gratefully moored on occasion, by their robust and enduring symbolism. It is quite unbelievable that, in a singular moment, everyday objects will be transformed into...

So Much Water (so) Close to Home

in Essays
posted January 25, 2018

On this day in 1745, Edmund Burke was engaged in writing a letter, marooned in his Arran Quay home by the rising Liffey floodwaters that inundated the floors below.1 He commented in his missive on the “melancholy gloom” of the day, and the ominous...

Landscape and the Built Environment

in Reviews
posted September 1, 2017

….. In the next imaginary room, we stay in Kilkenny but turn our attention to the natural world. Bernadette Kiely’s paintings record areas around the river Nore in Thomastown to stunning effect. The sum of their material and occular arrangements mimics natural ecosystems. Her...

Memory Needs a Landscape

in Essays
posted May 27, 2017

The relationship between rural Irish communities and the land is both pragmatic and poetic, played out through intimacy with its anatomy: fields, boundaries, hedgerows, rights of way and historical provenance. Bernadette Kiely’s approach to landscape painting mines these psychological and physiological relationships as a...

Quay

in Essays
posted January 1, 2011

An exhibition of largescale paintings and drawings. Bernadette Kiely’s four years focus on the stretch of the river Nore opposite her home and studio resulted in an intense and immersive period of attention. She focused on the rise and fall of the river and...

A Second World − any given day

in Essays
posted July 1, 2006

Every minute, the mist became thicker. The air became colder still and everything became paler and paler until soon there was nothing but grey and white all around them. They were in a country of swirling mists and ghostly vapours. There was some sort...

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