Launch of Bernadette Kiely's exhibition – ASHES AND RAIN

Join us for the opening of Bernadette Kiely's exhibition ASHES AND RAIN.

A light lunch and refreshments will be served.

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The earth is now experiencing the warmest and wettest years on record, resulting in weather events of such volatility and severity that despite the most advanced technology, scientists can no longer make predictions or long-range forecasts with certainty. Drawing on the transformative effects of weather changes both locally and worldwide, artist Bernadette Kiely’s experiences of flooding on the river Suir while growing up and on the river Nore as an adult, inform her profound awareness of environmental and ecological shifts. The effects of weather on land and on human lives has been an enduring theme in her practice for over 20 years.

Inspired by the past and the present day, in large-scale paintings, photographic imagery and text, Bernadette focuses on often overlooked and unseen human activity – what occurs ‘around and between’ disruptive weather events. In paintings based on her own photographic archive and her research imagery, she explores past and contemporary human responses in themes of memory, community and the passage of time while simultaneously looking beyond the earth towards possibilities of new lands and new futures in works embodying fragility, resilience and hope.

“Bernadette Kiely’s work is a powerful invitation to show up in the face of climate change, it is so timely and important for anyone interested in the future of the planet we live on”. Lisa Fingleton, artist, writer and climate activist. (Don’t Need No Country, Don’t Fly No Flag, Galway International Arts Festival 2024).

“Bernadette Kiely paints the climate emergency with such subtlety that it gets under your skin and you realise just how urgent it really is” – Dr. Fionna Barber, April 2023.

A graduate from the South East Technological University (SETU) and the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK, Bernadette is a member of Aosdana and is represented by Taylor Galleries, Dublin. She was a founder member of the Thomastown Environmental Association in 1990.

Selected recent exhibitions include: ’Hidden Worlds’, curated by Eamonn Maxwell for Wexford Arts Festival 2024, ‘from Source to Sea’, curated by Michael Waldron, Crawford Gallery, Cork, (2024); ‘don’t need no country, don’t fly no flag’, Galway International Arts Festival 2024, Galway, ‘A New Landscape – scenes of (a) local nature’, Thomastown Creative Arts Festival 2023,; ‘RHA Annual Exhibition 2023’, Dublin, ‘A New Landscape – Cork or Venice [who cares, who can tell]’, Lavit Gallery, Cork (2023); ’Imagine Life without art’, Custom House Gallery and Studios, Westport Quays, Westport, Co. Mayo. (2022,); The Contemporary British Painting Prize 2022, Huddersfield Art Gallery and Thames Side Gallery, London, UK, The Zurich Portrait Prize 2022, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin and the Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, (2023). Her work is held in many public and private collections in the EU and the USA.

An introduction to Bernadette Kiely’s work by Donegal-based artist and writer Cornelius Browne and a new essay by art historian Dr. Fionna Barber, Reader in Art History at Manchester School of Art and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Irish Art (forthcoming 2025) will accompany the exhibition.

February 8 – March 22, 2025

Host or Publisher The Regional Cultural Centre