Profile °15 – BERNADETTE KIELY

essay by Aidan Dunne; interview by Jo Allen; afterword by Ciarán Benson

ISBN 978 0946846 801     60 pages (paperback)     22.5x22.5cm    41 illus 

Bernadette Kiely’s career began in graphic art, and it was while working in a gallery that she realised she wanted to be a full-time painter. In this book she describes how she made that transition, and talks of the artists and influences that helped her along the way. She tends to concentrate on a theme or a ‘groups’ in her paintings, such as ‘fire’ or ‘sky’ or ‘famine’ or ‘old ruins’. Keily also explains her choices behind the media she uses, and her long-term interest in the concept of change in the context of the landscape and the elements. Aidan Dunne suggests the artist enjoys an ambivalent relationship with the sublime, which at other times is evidently set against Romanticism. He places her firmly on a continuum of her own making between the two. Her use of light and the four elements result in paintings full of transitory maelstroms and illusions which can be interpreted as reflections of our own relationship with landscape. Kiely’s paintings, evidence of her love for the place she inhabits (south Co Kilkenny) are ideal illustrations of the process of ‘place-making’.

EXTRACTS

"In summary, Kiely paints both places and spaces, refuges and prospects, landscapes that are both steeped in personal significance for her and that explore the way we instinctively find significance in landscape. Her work implies that the bonds between people and landscape are implicit and profound. The rhythmic patterns of ceaseless change in nature measure out human lives, and the histories of our lives are inscribed in the land. But the intimacy of this relationship extends to the vastness of the world in which we find ourselves, and the Sublime spectacle is not an overwhelming otherness but a reflection of ourselves."

— from the essay by Aidan Dunne

"Feelings make places and ‘Place’ – feelings of how a place looks or smells, the feeling of how familiar or strange a place seems, the feelings of how resonant it is of sorrows or delights. Such feelings make a space into this or that kind of place. Artists show us how this making of place works. Spectators can be brought on journeys which enable them to have and to use highly specific feelings to create or recreate specific ‘senses of place’. Sometimes the depicted sense overlaps with our own, already existing senses of a place. Other times we acquire a sense of place as a kind of gift, and thereafter it is hard to perceive a particular place without the mind-altering prism of that aesthetically mediated encounter: ‘that is a Paul Henry sky’, we find ourselves saying on a summer afternoon on a hill in Connemara, or ‘a Seán McSweeney pool’ when walk­ing a Sligo bog, or ‘Tony O’Malley’s rooks’ on an unsettled winter’s day around Callan. Now we have the intimate and the magnanimous pleasures of south Kilkenny and its hinterlands distinctively recreated for us as a world in the subtle, deeply affectionate paintings of Bernadette Kiely. It is the task of criticism (which is to say, of reflective understanding) to say how this works and, sometimes, to be able to say why it does so in this particular way for this particular artist."

— from the afterword by Ciarán Benson

"With the van, I had a mobile studio for about eighteen months, and went down a lot to Bunmahon, on the south coast – where we used to go as children – which is very off the beaten track. By doing a lot of drawing I brought myself back into nature, where I really looked at what was there. What interested me, and still does, wasn’t so much the landscape, but what was happening within it. Water on sand featured a lot in this first body of work. From there I moved to the very large sky paintings. As with water, the sea on the sand, the sky is also constantly changing. There are two phrases that I’ve been really interested in for years: potential instability and conditional instability. They are actual weather terms. During the making of the sky paintings, I became aware of those terms and how much they can be related to anything. Instability is something that interests me a lot."

— Bernadette Kiely in conversation with Jo Allen

It seems she does not purposely choose dramatic or romantic scenes, rather her work is an exploration of her everyday rural environment – flooded fields, slowly disintegrating gates, walls, old ruins, smouldering straw and stubble – but the resulting paintings ... are dramatic in their intensity.  — Marianne Hartigan, Sunday Tribune