"This open pluralism, both political and cultural, was one of the great accomplishments of the 1990s, at least in Ireland, where it replaced the modernist notion of an elite avant-garde set against mass culture. This mixing of categories and genres has become the accepted style for many artists."
"In short, it is against this background that we can review the works of these two artists."
"Bridget's paintings are of astonishing visual delicacy and emotional intensity. The need is for felt experience - immoderate, direct, unified, vivid, textural and rhythmic..."
"These works are schematic in form and luxurious in facture. The terrestrial areas are highly impasted and the solar areas, open and spare by contrast. The firmly painted forms are never geometrically neat, but varied, like many of the silhouettes that evolve from objects or elements that surround us."
"However, the exact subject is often elusive - usually it is one or more fragments situated in a space that shifts from interior to landscape - but the realised image is a brilliant construction of diaphanous colour. They abound in marvellous pictorial detail - subtle transitions of light and shade and sudden shifts of intensity. They represent, I think, a remarkable integration of the romantic and the analytical elements of her sensibility, bringing her art to a high level of lyrical expressionism on a two-dimensional surface."
"Robert, on the other hand, works three-dimensionally and brings something new to the established conventions of Irish sculpture."
"We are always conscious - and, indeed, made conscious - of the sheer weightiness of these materials, yet our experience of the work is an experience of subtle, shifting modulations of light and shadow. Without subterfuge or disguise, with every element of their ingenious but essentially simple syntax clearly manifest, these constructions of limestone and glass induce an extraordinary feeling of inwardness and intimacy."
"They are cast/realised in the lyric mode which is another measure of their distance from familiar conventions of Irish three-dimensional expression. The entire vocabulary here is one of organic and inorganic abstraction. Both have conspired to create something new."
"To employ such a language to create objects of such tonal delicacy requires not only immense technical skill but also something rarer - an audacious leap of the sculptural imagination."
"Finally... in terms of what we experience in Bridget's and Robert's art - i.e., style, signature, intention and theme - I would like to quote the late art historian, Sir Ernst H. Gombrich:"
The emergence of abstract art is one sign that there are stiff men and women able to assert feeling in the world. Men and women who know how to respect and follow their inner feelings, no matter how irrational and absurd they may first appear. From that perspective, it is... political and economic factors that tend to appear irrational and absurd... If contemporary painting and sculpture has an intellectual and social background, it is only to enhance and make more rich an essentially warm, simple, radiant act, for which everyone has a need... and that need is great...
Michael Casey 2002
