Bernadette Keating

Bernadette Keating (*1976, Dublin) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Germany, University of the Arts London, UK and University of Limerick, Ireland.

 

At the core of my artistic practice is the question of place and what it makes of us, and how photography, charged with political motivations and ideologies, can be used to construct a sense of place. This is where my interest in producing images begins, and also reflects on a formative period before my artistic career when I first studied politics and history. Working between a conceptual and documentary approach to image-making, I explore notions of space, place, and belonging in urban spaces, corporate developments, and border territories, and the sociopolitical forces that shape them. Grounded by research, I interpret these familiar landscapes of everywhere and nowhere, and objects found within, in a new view over time, exposing their surfaces and materials, and the output of the individual labourer. What arises in the process, through photographic series, sequencing, cutting and repetition is a new experience of the remoteness of the real.

 

The IKS holds six works from her series Líne. These pictures of the hedgerows which forms the boundary of the small farm in Co. Laois, in the Irish midlands, where the artist grew up. What began as a meditative walk with her camera on visits home, became a remapping of sorts of this boundary. The electric wire fence, now part of the landscape, is used as an active motif in the series.

 

Líne, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Líne, 2020. Pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Paper, 45 x 30 cm (paper size) © Bernadette Keating / courtesy IKS Collection

 

 

Exhibition "Changjng States: Ireland", Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin