Essay on the work of Emma Berkery

Many people are somewhat mystified by abstract art and viewers often approach it with the question, ‘What does it mean’? We are creatures of our

environment and this desire to find explicit meaning in images reflects our need to feel secure in our understanding of the world around us. Hence our need

to interpret shape and form as representing recognisable objects, and consequently we often find abstract art ‘difficult’ to understand. If we needed proof of

this mental process, we need only think of the famous Rorschach test used by psychologists to test a patient’s perception and emotional functioning. In this

test, inkblot shapes are presented to patients who are asked to interpret them to represent something meaningful to their own personal experience. This

demonstrates that we seem to feel a strong mental need to make the abstract concrete.

Emma Berkery has dedicated her artistic career to making abstract pictures, from her initial training in Limerick and Galway, to further study and practice in

Belfast. She acknowledges the influence in her work of the great 20th century painters of Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field and Lyrical Abstractionism.

These artistic movements overlap and are often used interchangeably, and many of the artists involved merged aspects of all of them in their work. Berkery

shares with them certain formal techniques and qualities. Like Joan Mitchell, she likes to initially place the canvas on the floor and obliterate the surface

completely before applying a very diluted paint that drips, bleeds and splashes on the surface, causing accidental marks which the artist can respond to and

develop. A similar technique was brilliantly termed ‘Soak Stain’ by Mitchell’s contemporary and compatriot Helen Frankenthaler. Berkery shares with these

artistic forebears a keen susceptibility of the femaleness of these processes, where the fluidity and flux of the painting serves as a metaphor for female

embodiment. She has also been influenced by the intense saturated colour of Grace Hartigan, and the works of Lee Krasner have inspired her to use

elements of collage in some of her smaller works on board.

However, although every creative artist carries within them their Musée Imaginaire, ultimately the question of influence must be seen as limited and indirect.

Those Titanides of Abstract Expressionism were, in their turn, subject to many eclectic influences, including early abstractionists like Vassily Kandinsky, by

Surrealism, and by the psychological investigations into the human sub-conscious carried out by Freud and Jung. Together these influences led to a form of

painting that was characterised by spontaneity of movement, emotional intensity and often a deep spirituality. It is these characteristics that are carried on in

Berkery’s work, rather than any real formal indebtedness. Artistic influence is merely a kind of baton passed down from generation to generation of artists

and what each individual artist does with that small stick of an idea is uniquely their own, mediated through their own influence, experience and psychology.

However, the way in which Berkery most closely follows in the footsteps of her Modernist predecessors is the seriousness she ascribes to the purpose of art,

and the way in which she is prepared to take on the mega-narratives of the human condition in her painting. In this Postmodern age, questions of style and

originality in art are often mocked, and it is true that there is nothing entirely new under the sun. But her commitment to the idea of art having a serious

purpose is what singles out her work in an age of reproduction, pastiche, and ironic playfulness. Hers is a brave personal view, open to expressing her own

vulnerability and generous in leaving space for the viewer to explore their own. She sees this ‘space’ in her painting as allowing room for an enquiry of the

self, for defining and redefining personal identity and politics. Because art is political too, but too often these days it resorts to a didactic, ideological position

that results in mere sloganizing. Berkery’s work does not harangue the viewer, on the contrary it is always open to subjective interpretation and individual

viewpoint. She has the courage to mine these human questions honestly, and it is the honesty and directness of the images she produces that invites the

viewer in. it is a brave form of painting, open to vulnerability, her own and ours.

One significant way in which Berkery differs from artists of Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field and Lyrical Abstractionism is in the way in which there is

usually a clear orientation and a definite viewpoint in her paintings. This is one of the reasons why there may be a temptation to read her paintings as

landscapes, as well as the fact that they are replete with naturally derived forms. And these are all inspired by the artist’s life experience, of growing up by the

Shannon in rural Co. Limerick and wandering its shores as a child; of mountain walks, and times spent outdoors with her family. Hints at liminal, watery

spaces, between solidity and liquidity, abound in the work. Berkery’s life has been saturated in nature, and the places that inspire her do so in a mediated way,

through layers of memory and emotion. As Joan Mitchell once said, ‘I carry my landscapes around with me’, but it is the way these forms and motifs are

reused, repeated and repurposed that make them attain a rarified and symbolic presence in an artist’s work.*

Circles are a common motif in Berkery’s paintings and these can also be understood as natural forms, both celestial and earthly, as suns and moons, or

whirlpools and eddies, as fissures and craters. But these forms are never used descriptively. Indeed, their arbitrary use deliberately confuses this way of

reading the paintings. They function compositionally in the paintings by leading the eye from one painted layer to the next and thereby inviting a deeper

exploration of the real subject of the paintings, the interior landscapes that each of us possess and that are wrought through human experience at a deeply

personal, psychological and spiritual level. In this way the painter arrives at the truly philosophical function of art, which is to help us to make sense of the

human condition, and to navigate the process of living. Artists must be possessed of a hyper-sensitivity to the visual world in order to create such paintings,

but we all have an innate capacity within us to formulate a personal response to those images, no matter how abstract or ‘difficult’ they at first may seem. It

may just take a little patience on the part of the viewer. Furthermore, Berkery’s work embraces the whole of nature, the comfort and the terror, the beautiful

and the sublime, the placid lake and the tsunami both. Hers is a complete and complex understanding of the awe-fulness of the world we inhabit and try to

make sense of in our daily lives.

Eventually then, in this transposition from place to feeling to image, particular landscapes and places become symbolic realms. The use of symbolism in

painting has changed over the course of many centuries of art practice. From very specific religious references in Medieval times, symbolism became

‘hidden’ in more secular times, and in our post-Freudian age of introspection has become deeply personal. The recurring circles mentioned above for their

compositional function in the paintings, also operate symbolically. The most commonly occurring form in nature, we cannot but be aware also of their

ubiquitousness in pre-Christian Celtic art, where they symbolised the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, and eternity. In Berkery’s work symbols act as a kind of

psychological metaphor. It is where painting and poetry overlap, leading the viewer to oblique, coded messages yet leaving ample space for ambiguity, for

individual enquiry. In this way the particular and personal references of the artist, such as the shape of her son’s birthmark which appears in several paintings,

become universal symbols for the viewer to discover and interpret for themselves.

The symbolism of colour has been scientifically examined since the Renaissance. In later centuries, Romantic and Symbolist artists used colour in more

subjective ways, and eventually Impressionism introduced a complete colour revolution. The 20th century then saw colour entirely liberated from

representation in order to convey pure energy and emotion. One of the earliest exponents of Abstract painting, Vassily Kandinsky, believed in the possibility

of attaining emotional pitch through colour, or Chromaesthesia. This is closely related to Synaesthesia (from the Greek Sin, meaning join and Aesthesis,

meaning perception), a word used to describe the neurological phenomenon of being able to hear the sound of a colour. He wrote;

‘Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key and another,

to cause vibrations in the soul’.**

However, colour theories can become complicated because of their lack of specificity, as particular colours can have different and often contradictory

meanings. Black, traditionally associated with power and authority, death, mourning and despair, can also represent safety, rest and refuge. Red is usually

associated with the strongest emotional states of love, but also with sacrifice. And yellow, while being the optimistic colour of friendship and hope contains

within it anger and madness too. These three are all signature colours in Berkery’s work and it is their contradiction that she uses over and over to signify

these clashes of feelings and emotions, and the contradictions inherent in the human condition. Black has become a more significant colour in recent

paintings. She first began to explore its contradictory nature when she returned to the studio after a period of inactivity and produced a series of

monochrome paintings. Although never exhibited, and some were even destroyed, fragments of them later found their way into smaller collages on board.

But the result of this experimentation was a deeper understanding of the emotional power of black.

Berkery’s painting process is lengthy and time consuming, especially as she works simultaneously on several pieces, setting up a ‘conversation’ between the

works. The initial marks have a certain randomness because of the fluidity of the paint used, and the way in which it is allowed to pour and drip on the canvas.

These marks are then responded to in layer upon layer of thicker impasto, creating discreet areas of frenetic painting, which is then further appended by

over-drawing with oil sticks. The effect of this push and pull of fluid and solid, darkness and illumination, sets up a dynamic tension in the picture plain. There

is drama and movement but the artist always gives the viewer a place to rest. There is a generosity of spirit in this process, for whatever the artist’s intentions,

however singularly meant are her formal ambitions, this ambiguity invites the viewer’s involvement. It is the very reason why certain paintings are so

compelling and demand to be looked at carefully over time.

Berkery paints in a range of sizes and of course scale plays a significant role in the effect conveyed by a painting. Her format is the square, which fixes a level

of geometric control on the frenetic movement in the composition and stabilises it. Most of her large paintings measure 122x122cm, though she has

recently joined canvases together in diptychs to form even larger work. Smaller pieces measuring 40x40cm are worked alongside the larger canvases, and

although they contain similar motifs and colour palette, they differ in sensibility and tone. They are less dramatic, gentler and more intimate. This is partly

due to the less physical painting process, as they are worked on the table or easel. The board is not as absorbent as canvas and so the paint sits differently on

the surface, and therefore the energy is more contained and controlled. The smallest works, measuring 25x25 are a way of working out ideas more quickly

and with less investment in time and materials. They have a sketch-like quality but do not function as sketches in the sense of being preparatory to larger

works, they are stand-alone paintings in their own right.

Like all visual artists, Berkery expresses herself in imagery, but there is a sense of poetics in the titles she gives to the finished works. Often these reflect the

state of mind of the artist while she was painting, or indeed they may reflect what the finished work seems to be saying, because this process is not entirely

within her control. Words like love, regret, fear and hope abound, and these demonstrate the level of emotion that is contained in the pictures. Painting is a

necessity for her, a way of working out those emotions and putting a meaningful shape on them. When not painting she is deprived of that avenue of release

and expression and feels depleted by its loss. One painting’s title, Always Breaking Beyond Somewhere, was inspired by her father’s wisdom, it being a term

he uses to indicate a passing storm, but which means so much more than a change in the weather. It signifies hope on the darkest of days. This led to a

series of paintings called Breaking Beyond which was also the title of an exhibition in the So Fine Art Gallery in Dublin in 2024.

Every artist has a relationship with her works, often formed over a long process of demanding and perhaps difficult painting. She recognises that a painting is

finished when it possesses a certain interior logic, it can be this way and no other. Then, when the work is exhibited to an audience the onus shifts to the

viewer, and they become the primary interpreter of the work. If that work is sold, then the buyer often becomes the sole interpreter, and their relationship

with the painting is personal. Most of us live with art at some level, whether that is experienced by visiting museums or by hanging pictures on the wall at

home. And for the viewer that art has many functions. It can be decorative, commemorative, political or even humorous. It can evoke nostalgia for people

and places, and it can also provoke extreme reactions, but at its best it can be utterly transformative. How then should the viewer approach Emma Berkery’s

paintings? Having discussed the ‘difficulty’ of abstract art in general and examined the particular formal quality and colour sensibility of Berkery’s work,

hopefully the reader has already gained some insight. Of course, there is beauty in these paintings, and often that is enough to bring joy to the viewer. And,

especially in the case of the larger paintings, within the composition are glorious passages of painting to be simply enjoyed. These operate like a single

musical phrase or a clear melody that stands out from an orchestral score and demands to be lingered over. Amid the swirls and whorls of the painted

surface, the artist has given the viewer a place to rest, a space to explore within the dynamic movement, to take their own journey. This journey will be

instinctive and intuitive, based on understanding rather than knowledge, centred in the emotions, and each viewer is free to form their own individual

response. So, instead of approaching a painting with the question ‘What does it mean?, the viewer should ask herself ‘What does it say to me?’ or even, ‘What

do I need it to mean’? This is both the freedom and the responsibility of the individual viewer.

Isabella Evangelisti

Art Historian

2025

Notes

*Sandler, Irving, ‘Mitchell Paints A Picture’, ARTnews, 1967, vol.56, pp.44-47, 67-70

**Kandinsky, Vassily, Concerning The Spiritual in Art, 1911