A serendipitous juxtaposition occurred with the new exhibit at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art. I mentioned this to Louisa Bermingham when we met at the museum to view her exhibition A Personal Ecology, which is installed in the Rick Faries Gallery adjacent to the ongoing exhibition of paintings by Janet Fish. The artist agreed, noting how Fish has been a lifelong influence on her work.

There is an obvious similarity in both artists’ exploration of the still life genre and their vivid, perhaps even Bermuda-inspired palettes.

The proximity of the shows underscores how each painter finds her personal voice within the shared parameters of intense colours and manipulated objects.

There is an affinity, certainly, but Bermingham embodies distinct and increasingly profound solutions in her still life paintings.

Whereas Fish created crowded compositions of overlapping objects, Bermingham reduces the complexity of the picture plane.

Rather, the works on view in the gallery are uncomplicated and direct, single vases with flora, or uncluttered interiors.

The paintings, though, are anything but simple. Her compositions of single, flower-filled vases allow the artist to work deeper by limiting the objects to explore both pictorial and personal solutions. The same is true with her interiors and landscapes.

In her by now identifiable style, Bermingham eschews naturalistic description for a loose abstraction, reminiscent of the late compositions of Henri Matisse.

She captures the same purity of colour, vibrantly balanced into unexpected combinations.

Like the late Modernist master, Bermingham lays down vibrant hues to emerge from the background and vie against the positive space of a leaf or a vase.

Also like the 20th-century Modernist master, Bermingham uses pattern, on a table or on a vase, to create a tension between the positive and negative space, foreground and background, or subjective and objective imagery.

This has long been Bermingham’s practice. She is no stranger to Bermudian gallery-goers. For over two decades, she has taught art to a range of audiences while prolifically exhibiting her still lifes, interiors, and landscapes.

Her panoramic landscape of Hamilton Harbour, the largest work in the gallery, also appeared in November at the Bermuda Society for the Arts.

Although her work has been consistent enough to be recognisable over the last 20 or so years, this exhibit indicates an evolution that denies complacency in style.

Jasmine Lee, curator of the exhibit, responded to this expansion of Bermingham’s style while reviewing her work before the show.

On one studio visit, she recognised how Bermingham was an artist who was “turning pages” in her work, breaking rules to add new elements to an already well-established artistic practice.

The works Lee selected from Bermingham’s studio form “A Personal Ecology”, paintings and ceramics that reveal an emotional undercurrent and betray the depth emerging from artistic maturity.

If ecology is the study of how organisms interact in an environment, the personal ecology that became the organising principle of this exhibition focuses on how Bermingham interacts within her immediate environment, the objects that strike her curiosity, or the imagery that connects to emotional states.

“These objects and paintings,” Bermingham explains, “come out of the moments that arise from moving around every day.”

Such daily explorations and inspirations are installed around the paintings in the gallery.

Lee, with Bermingham’s input, has installed Bermingham’s ceramics and her scavenged natural objects. To the artist, such ephemera carries an emotional contact and sparks curiosity.

Take the stick rubbed smooth by the ocean, marked by random patterns and colour shifts. What animal caused the holes on the sand-polished surface? What path did it travel to create its patterns and colours?

Many of the ceramics Bermingham installed refer back to the painted compositions, refiguring recurring motifs. The running infinity knot appears several times on her hand-built pottery and is pictured on the vases in the still lifes.

Other motifs appear on vases, like a Chinese dragon or marine imagery.

Often, the vases become a space for personal interrogation. In her painting My Calm In the Storm (2026), the vase also points to an interior world, doing two jobs at once.

The tempest decorating it is a picture within a picture, operating both decoratively and metaphorically. While it conveys inner turmoil, it blends with the exterior world around the edges of the canvas.

The painting is then balanced by the red buds of the flower stalks, gently falling across the composition and bringing the viewer back to the still life format.

References to weather — windblown waves and fog — carry the weight of interior states, but in addition, they point to the Bermudian environment in which she moves.

Another recurring form is the locust and wild honey leaf, which appears in two compositions on view, Bruises and Emancipation Day.

Defying the actual gloss of the leaf’s surface, Bermingham challenges herself to include shifting and contrasting colours (as many as she could, she said) to suggest light and shadow but not change the nature of the leaf.

The sophisticated exploration of colour is on full display in Emancipation Day.

Unexpected citrine oranges meet icy blues to suggest highlights on the leaf. Shadowed areas travel from the recognisable green to a rusty violet. The panoply of hues is anchored by the emphatic pattern of a yellow-and-blue tablecloth.

It risks visual cacophony, but Bermingham adeptly balances the contrasts.

Further investigation of Emancipation Day rewards the viewer with a recognisable, irregular pattern on the vase.

What at first appears as blue and yellow forms circling the outer edges begins to coalesce into a view familiar to Bermudians, Somerset Cricket Club during Cup Match.

Like the cricket match, the Bermudian forms ripple underneath the surface of many of these paintings, while avoiding overt description.

For Bermingham, her surroundings act as an impetus for exploration of her constant curiosity. But the handling of these moments is entirely her own.

The objects on view, both the three-dimensional ones and their painted counterparts, provide comfort or inspiration in their quiet beauty, or they might embody periods of struggle.

Either way, in the deft brush of Bermingham, the quiet and personal evolve into inspired abstraction.

• Louisa Bermingham’s A Personal Ecology, curated by Jasmine Lee, is on view in the Rick Fairies Gallery at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, in the Botanical Gardens, and runs through April 25, 2026