Don’t Need No Country, Don’t Need No Flag
“We look at the world once, in childhood, the rest is memory” – Louise Gluck / As water flowed confidently from the river to the quay and on to our little patch of land, into the hall,...
Read MoreA New Landscape – scenes of [a] local nature by Shannon Maria Carroll
“And I’d rather be strolling along the quay, and watching the river flow,”… is a line from The Two Travellers, a poem by C.J. Boland, which Bernadette Kiely and I discuss on a studio visit at...
Read MoreA Riverine World By Cristín Leach
- by Berne
- 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...
Read MoreBernadette Kiely evokes an isolation that has become routine.
- by Berne
- in Reviews
- 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
Read MoreI Never Think of the Future, it Comes Soon Enough
- by Berne
- 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...
Read MoreFinding Tenacity in Fragile Things
- by Berne
- 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...
Read MoreSo Much Water (so) Close to Home
- by Berne
- 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...
Read MoreLandscape and the Built Environment
- by Berne
- 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...
Read MoreMemory Needs a Landscape
- by Berne
- 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...
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