Bernadette O’Toole is an artist and Lecturer in Fine Art at Lancaster University. Her practice explores the relationship between the space of painting and writing, re-evaluating the disciplinary codes, conventions, and discourses that underpin spatial and temporal readings of painting and poetry. More broadly, Bernadette is interested in how image and text are read; how meaning emerges from the complex relationship between word, image, and sound. Alongside her painting practice, recent experimental writing operates across genres – oscillating between creative, critical, and philosophical modes of expression.
Bernadette O’Toole was awarded a British Academy Education Bursary to study for a Master of Fine Art at Newcastle University, and the Vice Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellowship at Sheffield Hallam University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, she was shortlisted for The Liverpool Art Prize 2011, and Marmite Painting Prize in 2011 and 2016. Her work is held in collections in the UK, Europe, and USA, Artist’s books are held in British Library, London, The Tate Gallery, Tate Library and Archive, London, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and CdLA, St-Yrieix-la-Perche, Paris.
Research
Her doctoral research, Beyond the Space of Painting and Poetry: Mallarmé and the Embodied Gesture, conceived as a series of dialogues with the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, re-imagines the space of painting through the space of poetry—through a network of reciprocal relations manifest in Mallarmé’s spatialised poetics. Bernadette uses performative strategies to engage with Mallarmé’s poem, Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (A throw of the Dice will never abolish Chance), drawing attention to the metaphoric possibilities of the space of the page and of the book. Her work operates across painting and writing, leading to the production of painting installations, artist books, and multiple video installations.
Thesis: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/29556/
Website: www.mbotoole.co
Recent exhibitions: Refractive pool, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 2022
https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/refractivepool
https://books-on-books.com/2022/05/01/books-on-books-collection-bernadette-otoole/