Judith Berry

At first glance the subjects of Judith Berry’s paintings appear to be monumental forms such as prairies, forests and mountains. Upon closer inspection they could be smaller, more manageable things, such as objects on a blanket or figures on a rug. In some paintings, grassy particles accumulate to form figures. These figures have an absurd quality: they seem to have grown out of the landscape in order to hasten the rate at which it changes. Sticks protrude from them, forming hands and indicating a wooden, skeletal structure. Recently Berry’s attention has shifted from the creation of these quasi-humans to simply painting piles of sticks surrounded by more verdant shapes. The vegetal figures have been absorbed into the landscape, leaving mounds of dirt, trees, and tunnels made of hedges. These new landscapes appear highly controlled but the forms they contain interact with each other to bring about new detours and chaos. Waterways twist, converge, and become stymied.The heaps of sticks inhabiting many of the paintings, suggest former structures and past seasons. They remind one of failure and degeneration but they also hint at the possibility of renewal.

The countless small repetitive brushstrokes of Judith Berry’s paintings describe forms that are prone to collapse and mutation. The use of perishable materials such as grass, bushes, and trees to represent more permanent structures such as canals, tunnels, and buildings is an attempt to create an ambiguous sense of time. They blend objects that disappear vanish from one season to the next with those that may take hundreds or thousands of years to disappear. Apparently calm, these landscapes nevertheless convey an awareness of events both natural and political, some of them cataclysmic, that come to shape any place. Landscapes can conceal the sites of atrocities. They are the surfaces that bear the brunt of human interference and they evolve in a way that is out of our control. Berry’s paintings do not describe the world with a documentary approach. They are about identity in the shifting but inextricable relationship between place and circumstance.