CIRCA 111 review

Kilkenny: Bernadette Kiely at Butler Gallery

Bernadette Kiely: Bog cotton I, 2003 - 2004, oil on canvas, 122 x 140 cm; courtesy Butler Gallery

Slow Time, Local Ground is Bernadette Kiely’s painted response to the north Mayo landscape. Spread over three years, a fellowship at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ballycastle, Co Mayo, stirred Kiely to explore this distinct and unspoilt countryside. Approaching the subject at first physically, Kiely walked the land, building her familiarity and knowledge by making copious drawings and photographs. Kiely’s process references Monet and Cézanne’s studies of light and atmospheric change, and her profound love of Irish landscape is inexorable.

Exact visual replicas are not created here. Rather it is the very essence of what it feels like to stand in the Mayo landscape; the damp, the wind, beautiful cloud-filtered light in all its sensuous desolation. Tilting the perspective towards detailed scraggy vegetation and earthy pools, Kiely focuses on the land’s surfaces. Steering the format away from panoramic landscapes that hinge on linear horizons, this almost claustrophobic close-up discovers the hued muck and the textured grit of rough terrain. Kiely portrays the ageless quality of the land, noting the slow passage of time. The work captures the fleetingness and timelessness of delicate blossoms, the wet peaty soil and diffused light. Slow Time, Local Ground does exactly what it says in the title.

Bernadette Kiely: Gorse II, 2003 - 2004, oil on canvas, 122 x 140 cm; courtesy Butler Gallery

Moderating deftly between the objective and the abstract, Kiely uses something of both methods. Colour is obviously a prime motivator; the expressive application of pigment is intrinsic to Kiely’s oeuvre, pushing the work to almost colour-field. Slow time, Local Ground creates challenges for the artist; for instance, disliking the garish gorse-bush yellow so profuse on the western seaboard, Kiely set out to see what could be made of it. This acrid yellow is the antithesis of the gentle and muted undergrowth and yet in the single canvas there is balance. In the series of Bog cotton paintings, Kiely wanted to paint in black and white but to make something more than a monochromatic work. Laying ethereal white bog cotton on the brown-black organic palette of the bog pool, the canvas resonates with the restraint and the wilds of romanticism.

Emer Marron is Senior Administrator in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin

Bernadette Kiely: Slow Time, Local Ground, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, December 2004 – January 2005; previously at Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, April - May 2004; Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, September – October 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 111, Spring 2005, pp.76

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