Flooded fields and streets turned to rivers – meet the Kilkenny artist capturing climate change outside her front door
Bernadette Kiely’s portfolio sounds at first like it focuses on subjects that many artists pursue – landscapes and water – but Ms Kiely’s paintings have a very different take on the topics.
She captures the transformations that occur when water invades the landscape.
Flooded fields. Streets turned into rivers. Everyday scenes made surreal when the waters rise.
She has lots of material from a childhood lived beside the often-swollen Suir, which once took the life of a neighbouring child, but she doesn’t have to work from memory.
Since she moved to Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, the Nore has been providing plenty of hairy moments to keep her brush strokes flowing.
“My house is up a little higher than others, and I am three steps up from street level, but the last big flood came up the third step, which is the highest it has ever come,” she said.
The River Nore as it passes through Thomastown, Co Kilkenny. Photo: Getty
“I was up the stairs looking out, watching it come up. And it’s a strange feeling.
“It came close to the top of the wall at the back. We have a ladder at the wall, but you couldn’t climb over it because you wouldn’t know what you would be stepping into on the other side. You don’t know where anything is.”
It’s that sensation of familiar places made otherworldly by extreme weather that Ms Kiely strives to recreate to help people grasp the true impact of climate change.
“I got a reproduction of a painting I did, which is a portrait of my daughter canoeing in a flood right outside our front door.
“I put it outside the house so everyone can see it, and people often remark on it and say, ‘oh, that’s your front door’, so therefore it becomes real.”
Artist Bernadette Kiely documents climate change through her paintings. Photo: Mark Condren
She hopes her paintings also prompt reflection on some of humanity’s worst habits.
“Flooding collapses geography and collapse borders. All the lines we draw on the land – all the demarcations – disappear.
“People are fighting over borders and then suddenly they’re gone.”
Ms Kiely’s exhibitions, which will feature in an upcoming book she is compiling, generate mixed reactions.
“There is a sense of melancholy; there’s solastalgia [the distress caused by changes in one’s environment] and grief for things that are passing; and then there’s the beauty of nature and landscape that people are drawn to.
“Floods can look spectacular – their scale, the reflections in the water – so there’s a sense of fascination too.
“I don’t set out to shock or upset people, but at my exhibition at the Galway International Arts Festival last year, people were crying.”
'Sweepers', oil on canvas. 153 x 213 cm. 2025 (Collection of the OPW). Inspired by huge flooding in Valencia in Spain, it also references Ms Kiely's neighbours and friends helping to clear up the mud and debris left after local flooding
With sea levels rising and rainfall becoming increasingly heavy, living by a river might seem a precarious choice but Ms Kiely has no plans to move.
“I wanted to live beside the river and document what was happening, so I’ll keep doing that.
“People will look at floods on TV or the paper and they think, well, that’s in Bangladesh or Spain, but when they see the paintings that I’ve done from my front door, it somehow makes it more real for them. That’s the importance of it.”