'I’ve the woods around me, and I’m beside the sea': Currabinny artist Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts at her studio in Currabinny, Co Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson
It is hardly surprising that Kim Roberts’ new exhibition of paintings, A New Beginning… in the End, is inspired by her experience of living by the sea. Roberts works from the studio at her home in Currabinny, on the shores of Cork Harbour, just a few miles downriver from where she grew up in Monkstown.
“I have this huge connection with the harbour,” she says. “I learned to swim in the sea when I was very young, and I'd always spend hours down on the beach, discovering stuff. I still do.”
Roberts’ exhibition, at the Grainstore at Ballymaloe House in East Cork, is the latest chapter in a story that began nearly twenty years ago when her husband Al Mathewson was offered a break from his career at the Tyndall Institute at UCC to work in France.
“We stayed in France for three years,” she says. “I’d worked in sales and marketing all my life, and it was only when we came back that I began thinking about a change in career. This was around 2009, just after the crash, and there wasn’t much chance of getting sales work.
“I was at a loss what to do. But then my neighbour Ev Wilson, who worked as a tutor at the Crawford College of Art, suggested I do a foundation course in art. I’d loved art at school, but I’d never done anything with it. But Ev encouraged me to throw a portfolio together, and I got accepted at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa on Tramore Road.
"I was in my late forties at that stage. I had so much going on in my life, and I was able to express myself in so many ways, in printmaking and painting and metal and sculpture. It was incredible. I stayed for three years, and it changed my life completely.”
Roberts applied to study for a Degree in Fine Art at the Crawford in 2012. “And again, I was accepted,” she says. “I was in there with all these young people. I think there were about eight of us mature students, but a mature student could be 23, you know, and I was nearly 50. I wasn’t sure if it was all going to be too much for me at first. But it was the best, another unbelievable experience.”
Roberts spent her first few years at college experimenting with different media. “But then, in 2014, I saw an exhibition of Dorothy Cross’s work at the RHA in Dublin. There was one piece where she hung the complete skeleton of a whale with its nose over a bucket. That blew me away completely. After that, I started suspending stuff from the ceiling as well. I learned how to make videos, and use sound.”
For her Degree Show in 2016, Roberts produced an elaborate multi-media installation. “It had what looked like portals on the wall, with videos and prints of sea scenes. I’d filmed some of the footage underwater, and I had the sound a submarine makes – that beep beep, like a heartbeat – echoing through the space.
"I’d also included this beautiful old block from a schooner that my dad found on the shore when he was only about 10 or 11. My dad came in to see the installation and he cried. He cried, and I cried. I’m going to cry again now, just thinking about it. It was so emotional.”
Roberts’ father died not long after that. “I was devastated. But I got an award for my Degree Show that allowed me to work at Cork Printmakers. That was another amazing place. I went in there and put my grief into printmaking. It was like a sanctuary for me, a safe place for me to go when I was not feeling the best.”
One of her works, a collographic print she titled Fractured, was chosen for an exhibition that toured throughout Europe. “I went to the opening in Sardinia,” she says. “Then the exhibition came back to the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. The show was opened by one of the head curators from the National Gallery in Dublin, and they bought my work for the collection. The thing was, though, the work had already sold, and I had to ask for it back so it could go to the National Gallery collection. Thankfully, the people who’d bought it were really understanding.”
Around that time, Roberts’ husband retired from the Tyndall Institute. “He decided he wanted to do something completely different to microelectronics. He wanted to study design, and he wanted to do it somewhere there was sunshine, so we moved to Thessaloniki in Greece.
“Thessaloniki is a real melting pot of food and art and culture. It’s a super place to be. Al did his design course, and I got involved in an art collective and started painting. I was in a few exhibitions with the collective in Athens and around the country. We loved Greece, and when Al finished his Masters, we decided to stay on a while longer.”
It was only when Covid hit in 2020 that they began thinking of moving home. “Greece handled the pandemic really well, but there’s one and a half million people living in Thessaloniki, and only a few small hospitals. So, yeah, we were getting a bit nervous, so we moved back to Currabinny.”
Roberts decided to build a studio on their land, and her husband was happy to design it. “It took about two and a half years to complete,” she says, “but it’s fabulous. I’ve got the woods all around me, with the birds and the badgers and the foxes. And I’m right beside the sea. I spend a lot of time beachcombing, as I’ve always done. As well as the paintings in my show, I’ve got a table with a small selection of my treasures under glass domes. They’re the inspiration for so much of my work.”
Roberts’ husband has now got involved with a Greek company. “They do work with the European Space Agency. He’s a very clever guy, and he likes to keep busy. I help out with the secretarial work. We get to travel to Greece quite regularly, and I love going back to visit my artist mates in Thessaloniki. We’ve very blessed.”
- Kim Roberts’ exhibition A New Beginning… in the End runs at the Grainstore, Ballymaloe House, Shanagarry, Co Cork until April 21. Further information: kimrobertsart.ie
