This is Irish painter Bernadette Kiely's first solo show in England, writes Jeannine Alton.

After studying and work at the Slade and in New York, she returned to rural Kilkenny, close to her birthplace, where time, seasons and elements provide her, as well they must, with continuous subject-matter for thought and art.

She shows a new, indeed very recent series of 16 pieces, some very large, others quite small. The title Slow time -- Marina's Field seems a tease. What can it mean?

Marina is a friend and neighbour whose field has already featured in a Kiely series. In March 2002 she phoned to say that bales of straw were being burned in her field. Kiely watched the scene for two hours on that bright, early spring Sunday morning. The paintings record it.

Is that all, then? Certainly not. What sort of record is it, why seek out such a scene and what about that strange phrase "slow time" in her title? It is a record, of course; here are the piercing, turquoise-blue March sky, the pinkish, barren winter earth, the black plastic bags exploding in swirls

of white (always white) smoke, the climbing waves of destruction . . . an apocalyptic scene for the viewer, not a conventional 'landscape'.

Yet this ignores Kiely's identification with rural life and her search for elemental subjects.

The burnt, rotten straw prepares the new season of seedtime. The cleansing fire, like the sea, river and clouds she has also painted, is a recurrent force of nature.

That's why so transient yet repeated an episode as flame can be called 'slow time'. What we really see, though, is paint; paint applied over time, scrubbed out, re-thought, in thick impasto or smooth patches, heightened as the sparks fly upward with tiny shreds of nylon rope, an intense, steady spectacle of colour.

The exhibition is on show at the Pierrepoint Gallery, Folly Bridge, Oxford.