NEW HIERARCHY
Dr. Margarita Cappock visits painter Bernadette Kiely at her home and studio in
Thomastown, Co Kilkenny. Please see here for more.
Irish Arts Review, Summer 2024
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, on to our kitchen floor, it headed...
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 her home in Thomastown. For anyone...
Read MoreA 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...
Read MoreBernadette Kiely evokes an isolation that has become routine.
- 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
- 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...
Read MoreFinding 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...
Read MoreSo 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...
Read MoreLandscape 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...
Read MoreMemory 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...
Read MoreQuay
- 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...
Read MoreFeatured in ‘Landscape and Ecology’ , pages 159/160 in the book
LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENT IN CONTEMPORARY IRISH ART by Yvonne Scott
Published by Churchill House Press, Tralee 2023