Bernadette is an Irish artist working primarily in painting and sculpture. Bernadette has exhibited nationally and internationally. She was an invited artist to Straight out of Ireland,2022, Philadelphia U.S.A. Youyi, Art Beijing, China (2021), Youyi, Hangzhou, China(2019), Irish artists in Nepal, Katmandu, India(2018), Seen and not heard, Crawford Gallery, Cork(2019), Cairde Visual, ModelArts Centre, Sligo (2019) and Watts Up, Bernardaud Foundation, Limoges, France 2014. She also exhibits regularly in the annual group shows at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Royal Ulster Academy, Society Women Artists London, Bath Society Artists, South West Academy U.K., and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. In 2025 Bernadettes work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. Awarded the Perpetual Silver Prize by the Royal Ulster Academy(2015), Irish News Award by the Royal Ulster Academy(2018), and Rosemary & Co. Award by the Society of Women Artists' London(2019), Bernadette was also shortlisted for the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Exhibition(2019),and the John Richardson Residency, France (2021). Her work is held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Statement
Living and working in Wexford, my work sits in constant dialogue with my surroundings - nature, memory, and the quiet rhythms of daily life and people. Even the small, almost incidental encounters become part of that ecosystem, grounding the work in something lived rather than constructed.
My work is rooted in childhood, both as memory and as a way of understanding the world. I’m interested in the vulnerability of children and the quiet resilience they carry, and how those early experiences shape us as adults. My paintings act as portals - small, precise triggers that unlock entire sensory worlds. A gesture, a posture, a fragment of clothing can collapse time, bringing the viewer back into their own past.
I make paintings and sculptures that often centre on young figures placed in sparse, open spaces. That space isn’t absence - it’s an invitation. It allows the viewer to enter, to project, to complete the image. The same restraint carries through into my mark-making. Faces are suggested rather than fully rendered, implied rather than fixed. The result is a kind of visual openness - where meaning isn’t delivered but discovered.
The compositions are deliberately pared back, with areas of empty ground that hold a sense of stillness and unease. The children I depict are not fixed in narrative. They act as emotional anchors, holding conflicting feelings of fragility and strength. The figures don’t simply present themselves - they confront. What begins as unease often turns into recognition, in that exchange, the work expands. It becomes layered with interpretations I never consciously placed there. The work sits between the real and the imagined, where memory and feeling overlap.
There is no rigid plan, no fixed outcome. Across painting and sculpture, I’m interested in capturing moments of emotional recognition. The process is responsive and intuitive, enabling the work to evolve naturally. Sometimes I draw from still images or fragments that trigger a particular emotional response, using these as a starting point rather than something to replicate.
I want the viewer to feel something of that early instinct, the part of ourselves that understands before it explains, and to reconnect with the strength that sits within vulnerability. I want the work to be more expansive that it becomes a shared emotional field - one where the viewer’s experiences sit alongside the artists.