Painting a drowned world, from Cork to Venice
The same day that Bernadette Kiely was installing her flood-themed exhibition in the Lavit Gallery, Wandesford Quay flooded.
A flood warning has been issued for Cork. The South Channel of the Lee is in its roiling, spring tide state: coffee-brown waters churn and eddy as oily raindrops bead across the surface of the torrent. Flotsam bobs in the crannies of the crumbling quay walls.
In the Lavit Gallery, artist Bernadette Kiely is calmly surveying the installation of her new exhibition, answering questions as her daughter makes final adjustments to a video installation, The Writing Is On The Wall, that forms part of the exhibition.
The video piece mirrors the fast-flowing waters of the scene outside. It’s footage shot in Thomastown, Co Kilkenny in 2016, when the River Nore was in full flood. In the lowest right of the frame is the edge of a stone wall, the water flowing past what looks like a foot below the top of the wall. The footage was shot from Bernadette’s home.
That December, Met Éireann weather stations reported rainfall levels double or even triple their Long Term Average.
Bernadette has lived and painted alongside the Nore for the past 30 years: the precarity of living in a flood zone, where a wall is the only thing separating your home from the rising water, is a part of her life.
“That year it came up to the third step, higher than it ever has before,” she tells me.
“Look at that wall. If it came over the wall, the whole place would be destroyed. My work, everything would be gone.”
“We live in it, walk in it, the rats swim in it,” she says. “The neighbour’s house floods and you’re helping to lift out all the furniture.”
In fact, Bernadette grew up with an awareness of the terrible power of rivers: her family lived first in Clonmel and then Carrick-on-Suir, where an early memory of a tragic drowning on the Suir continues to make its mark on her to this day.
She was six when a little boy fell into the river, and her father assisted in recovering his body.
“He had tried to jump on a barge,” she says. “He was only about four, and he slipped down and nobody could see him. My father was a very good swimmer and so he went down and got him. I remember that as a massive thing. It was sort of a big wakeup call, that this lovely river we’re looking out on is not so lovely: it’s just killed a little boy. That definitely did something to me.”
Later in her life, the Lee would also feature for a time, when she lived in Montenotte, perched on the hillside with a daily view of the river.
But in her latest exhibition, A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork Or Venice, Who Cares, Who Can Tell, Bernadette is purposefully dissolving the notion of place, of specific bodies of water.
Oil paintings of flooding on the Lee, the Shannon, the Blackwater and the Nore, some sourced from her own photos and some from news outlets, are juxtaposed with paintings of Bangladeshi people carrying livestock to safety, of melting icebergs and of the semi-submerged street furniture of Venice, art capital of the world.
“When everywhere is flooded, there is a collapse of geography, if you’re looking down from above,” she says. “The borders disappear.”
The inclusion of Venice is a sharp glance at Bernadette’s own industry’s response to climate change, she says.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Venice, over the past number of years,” she says. “All those cruise ships, destroying the lagoon. There was all this talk of the Biennale, and artists going there to make work on the environment, but still going there. So I thought a lot about that place, the art world, what was happening, and the sinking of it.”
One of the things that attracted Bernadette to exhibiting A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork Or Venice, Who Cares, Who Can Tell in the Lavit was the proximity of the river, which she says gives the show an almost site-specific element. She’s done this before, when she exhibited in the Luan gallery in Athlone, overlooking the Shannon.
In Cork, the titles of some of the pieces take on new meaning: Bernadette has been following the story of the second city’s flood defence debate and weighs in on the side of the Save Cork City campaign.
“When I heard they were going to build a wall in Cork it was just….” she sighs. The attempt to control the power of water with a series of walls and demountables is, she says, “laughable and slightly pathetic. I did a painting of the wall they built in Carrick, where again, the river just comes up to the top of the walls, and all the guys out working are just going, ‘oh fuck.’”
We need to work with the forces of nature to protect from the forces of nature, she believes: “Trees are the best answer we have. Trees help keep riverbanks in place and riverbanks help soak up the water.”
Outside, as we talk, the South Channel gathers itself; hours after I leave Bernadette, Wandesford Quay will flood. Long outside of office hours, I find myself calling Lavit Director Brian Mac Domhnaill for an update: is the gallery ok, and Bernadette’s paintings?
The gallery, situated on a slight rise, has not been affected, the flood has not been major, and waters on the Sharman Crawford end of the street subside within hours.
But the coincidence seems like a convergence of conversation and experience: is this what we have to look forward to?
The sixth International Panel on Climate Change report was published Monday. The common gripe is that the report is not generating enough coverage, that the media is still gripped by Don’t Look Up factor.
The beauty of drowned worlds
Bernadette doesn’t want to preach: she paints what she observes, she tells me. But she doesn’t want people to take this exhibition at face value, as a collection of beautiful paintings.
“You can’t proscribe, and I don’t think I’m setting out to warn people,” she says. “I think people will see the beauty and the threat. I would hope people do see the threat too, and not just come in and go, oh, they're beautiful paintings. Because I do get a lot of that. But you can also recognise the beauty of the landscape underwater, too. And it’s absolutely magical.”
“The beauty is so powerful, and the destruction is so powerful.”
A NEW LANDSCAPE – Cork Or Venice, Who Cares, Who Can Tell by Bernadette Kiely runs until April 15 at The Lavit Gallery, Wandesford Quay, Cork.