Bernadette Kiely: From Venice to Cork with art inspired by flooding
Bernadette Kiely's exhibition at the Lavit is 'A New Landscape – Cork or Venice | who cares, who can tell'.
All her life, it seems, the artist Bernadette Kiely has been fascinated by water. That fascination finds eloquent expression in 'A New Landscape – Cork or Venice | who cares, who can tell', her current exhibition at the Lavit Gallery in Cork. It features paintings of flooded landscapes, murky streams and rivers, and the desolate buildings on their banks.
It is no surprise to learn that water features in her very earliest memory. “We lived in the top flat of one of those big old buildings in Clonmel, in Co Tipperary,” she says. “I was one year old, and my mother raised me up so I could see out the window. Outside our home, the first thing I ever saw was the River Suir in flood.”
In her childhood, the family moved from Clonmel to Carrick-on-Suir, and again lived by the river. "I’ve lived in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, for the past thirty years, and the first thing I see when I step outside the door is the River Nore. So you could say that rivers and flooding have always been part of my experience.”
It was almost inevitable that water would inspire her show at the Lavit. “I really like Cork,” she says, “and the gallery is right beside the River Lee, so I started to think about creating a body of work in relation to the flooding in the city. Cork has often been described as the Venice of Ireland, and as I was putting the show together I was thinking a lot about Venice in relation to climate change. The Venice Art Biennale was on last year. Venice floods regularly, and there was a lot of discussion about making work about the environment.
“I was also thinking about the idea of geography and borders in the context of flooding, and asking if anybody really cares about the environment. And of course many people do care, so the title of my exhibition is not just a throwaway comment.”
The setting of some of her paintings is deliberately vague. Cork Or Venice (Who Cares. Who Can Tell), the work that lends its title to the exhibition, features several sets of café tables and chairs in water a foot deep, but nothing that might offer further clues to where the scene is located.
“If you were dropped from the sky, you might look for landmarks,” says Kiely. “But if there is flooding, you could be anywhere. It almost wouldn’t matter.”
Other paintings, such as Careysville, Blackwater Fisheries, connect more to specific places. “I came across that image I’d taken about five years ago. It got me thinking about fisheries. I assume the fish are in cages, but I wondered what happens if there’s a flood. Do the fish escape? Are they let go? I just found it intriguing, wondering what would happen to the fish in a situation like that.”
Kiely is well-established in the Irish art world. She has exhibited regularly since the 1990s, and has been a member of Aosdána since 2007. But she began her career as a graphic designer, graduating with a first class honours from the College of Art and Design in Waterford, and working in advertising in London and New York.
“Graphic design was what my teachers advised me to do,” she says. “It was a very good grounding. I learned skills in relation to designing posters and logos, all that kind of stuff. But the clients always gave me a brief, they just wanted someone to realise their ideas, there was no room for me to actually come up with ideas of my own.”
Eventually, she returned to education, studying at the Slade School of Art in London. “I had always drawn and painted as a child,” she says. “And when I came back to painting, I liked that I could do pretty much anything I wanted with it. When I work with technology, I always have to find someone to help me with it, whereas with art, I work with materials like charcoal and oils, and it just comes naturally to me.”
In Thomastown, Kiely works from a studio built by the late painter Barrie Cooke, on the site of a former handball alley. “Barrie was a great friend of Séamus Heaney, who was often here and even wrote a poem about it. It’s a great space, and I’m very lucky to have it.”
Although she is mostly a landscape painter, Kiely sometimes produces portraits. Most recently, she painted her friend and neighbour in Co Kilkenny, the artist and environmentalist Paul Mosse. “I’m very interested in Paul’s work,” she says. “It’s terrific. He’s not on social media or anything like that, so a lot of people might not have heard of him. I’d wanted to make a portrait of him for some time, and I was lucky in that it was chosen for the Zurich Portrait Prize and was hung in the National Gallery of Ireland this year.”
Kiely is already at work on her next body of paintings, which will be shown at the Taylor Galleries in Dublin. It is partly inspired by her observations of the cattle that graze by the Nore. “There’s an environmental element to this series too,” she says. “They say cows are one of the creatures that are most likely to survive an environmental crisis. They’ve already had to learn to adapt and be resilient. So the exhibition will basically be about the survival of the fittest, and will focus on the collective and collaborative nature of cows and plants.”
- Bernadette Kiely’s A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork or Venice | who cares, who can tell runs at the Lavit Gallery until April 15
- lavitgallery.com
- bernadettekiely.ie
