Katey Berry
Artist
Landscapes/Mindscapes (2020 - present)
I walk daily in the rural Pecos River Valley of northern New Mexico.
My paths take me through deep canyons, along riverbanks, and onto high rocky ridges overlooking miles of open land. Moving through this landscape, I experience both intimacy and vastness - qualities that continually inform my work.
My paintings are built in distinct stages. Lines (drawn or carved), and painted fields of color establish mood and space. The surface is then coated with beeswax into which hundreds, and often thousands, of individually dyed threads are embedded. The threads create the depth, movement, rhythm and place. After the thread is pressed into the wax another coat of wax is applied. Through repeated acts of gently pressing, smoothing, carving, and burnishing, the thread becomes fully embedded into the wax and the surface then becomes a luminous waxy cohesive skin that captures and reflects light.
Before being embedded, some threads are unwound and soaked in dye baths made from materials drawn from daily life and surrounding landscape - tea, spices, avocado skins and pits, wine, and plants gathered on walks. This process is both experimental and deeply rooted in the long history of human transformation of natural materials into artistic expression.
The repetitive acts of unwinding, dyeing, embedding, carving and burnishing are meditative, highly detailed and physically demanding. They foster an intimate relationship with the materials and connect me to ancient traditions of making. While working, I remain attentive to the inherent character of each thread. They contract, expand, bend, and occasionally break. Rather than imposing complete control, I allow the materials to reveal their own forms, and possibilities.
Through rhythmic lines, luminous surfaces, and nature derived materials, my work explores memory, place, time, the body's devotion, focus and rhythym(s) and the experience of being fully present.
Meaning is discovered through process, and process is shaped by meaning.
On past work:
Cocoons (2019)
I made cocoons from one continuous wax-coated thread. These cocoons are meant to hold, conjure, and embody the idea of Metamorphosis. Metamorphosis = a change of the form or nature of a thing or person into a completely different one, by nature or supernatural means. Metamorphosis is the epitome of powerful life change. I made these cocoons for a year and the making of them eventually led to the paintings I started to make in 2020 and still make now.
Cubes (2014 - 2019)
I made 6" empty wood Cubes that I filled with hand-made ceramic objects, mirrors, and photographs with a single glass-enclosed viewing portal. These cubes held spaces that only the eye and mind could access and that only one person at a time could view, reinforcing the intimacy and non-physicality of seeing. Inside the cube, on its interior walls, I surrounded my ceramic objects with mirrors and photographs I took of them outside the box to address how we see: there is the immediate seeing of the object itself, the seeing through reflection in mirror image, and seeing the object in the past in photographs. This work was my way of addressing and clarifying the many ways we see and hold objects in our mind's eye.
Collaborations with insects, time, and weather (2011 - 2013)
While walking in the New Mexican mountains, deserts, and river beds
I collect decaying pieces of wood.
I am struck by how they have been dramatically re-shaped by insects, time
and weather.
Their bodies reveal their histories.
Collaboration begins when I thoroughly gut each piece of its soft rot and reveal
the hard form; its core.
This is a process of discovery because I cannot predict what will be uncovered.
I then scrape, sand, and smooth each piece and surround them in earth-based mediums: clay, wax, and metal leaf.
The process feels deeply ceremonial and ritualistic...
from the selecting...to the gutting...to the surface working...to the re-dressing...
to the mounting on the wall or placement on a pedestal...
subject and I go through a transformation.
Portraits of the Microscopic (2006 - 2013)
Fascinated with what the naked eye cannot see I did portraits of microscopic and astronomic systems using gold leaf and plaster. Overlaying gold leaf on top of the plaster and carving out the images felt very intimate and precise as the subject matter seemed to ask of me. Gold leaf lending its transcendent, light-reflecting, quality to these subjects allowed these life systems to glow.