Elizabeth Berrien is an internationally recognized wire sculptor. Berrien was born in 1950 and is known as the godmother of the contemporary wire sculpture movement. As a young child she always had an affinity towards animals. She would lay on her lawn for hours and study small ants and other insects. She said that at age five she was gazing at the ceiling and she visualized a long line looping back on itself. She then began to used a crude form of knitting to make a blanket for her pet turtle. While it was not a success, it was from that point that she began to pioneer new uses for fiber. All throughout her years in grade school she was marked as gifted and excelled in math. Her love for geometry and topology were crucial to her later experiments with wire sculpture. Berrien always had trouble expressing herself creatively in high school. She says that she could see the "energy lines" that made animals beautiful but she had difficulty transferring them onto paper. She almost abandoned her passion for art until she was forced to enroll in a sculpture class. Her teacher, Kenneth G. Curran, trained Elizabeth to explore different ways to express herself using creative problem-solving. He forced to to go out of her comfort zone and explore the use of wire. When the idea of her going to art school was proposed, Curran fought against it. He stated, "you're a non-conformist. You're doing a good job not being influenced by Alexander Calder, but most college art teachers have a personal mandate to influence the hell out of their students. Just go out there and have a life, the wire will take care of itself."
QUESTIONS:
1. How does Berrien's choice of material impact the content of her work? Does it impact the content at all? 2. How did what was going on in Berrien's life and what was going on around her change her subject of work? Did it change the content? (use information from the bio on her website) 3. Do the events or people from your past or current life affect your body of work similar to the way Berrien's does? Does your choice of material impact your content?
5 Comments
Natalie Kim
5/10/2019 10:58:00 am
I really love the parallels between her art and yours, especially with the intricacies of the wire within the larger scheme! I found it really interesting to learn how her art teacher specifically told her to not go to art school, a contradictory statement to the normal path of art. I really enjoyed learning how she had trouble expressing herself until she was forced to do sculpture with wire and I think that a lot can be learned from that because it shows that while the typical art methods may not work out for you and your personal style of expression, there is a method out there, or a method for you to create yourself, that will act as a better method to share your artistic vision.
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Mason
4/15/2021 05:06:45 am
Do you have siblings :)
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5tuktyhjrtghr
9/18/2022 08:22:44 am
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kimmy ploper
9/18/2022 08:23:28 am
stop you butthole cheek
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