CARTOGRAPHIC STUDIES

In these new paintings Alison Berry has adopted an increasingly map-like paradigm for exploring the beliefs and perceptions which frame and locate our understanding of the world. Challenged by social concepts which are both fundamental and hard to define, she creates an intellectual landscape designed to explore not just what we think, but also how we think.

In "Moral Compass”, for example, Berry takes on the question of free will, biological disposition, and moral choice. Emanating from a central compass motif, a network of forking paths trace out the simple structure. On the left hand side, an Eden-like garden and flock of migrating birds bring to mind the laws of nature. A blue lizard lounges in a tree. The fruit is eaten; the scene shifts. To the right, a variety of models for interpreting human behavior play out. A large structure houses two small figures, recalling the prisoner’s dilemma. A pack of dogs cooperate to hunt a stag, while another chooses to pursue self-interest, and goes off alone to chase a rabbit. In the upper right corner a second structure hosts a group of birds, medieval symbols for the passions of pride and vanity, as well as the idylls of wisdom, charity and justice. And at the far right, the hawks and doves enact their age-old battle.

The painting "Lighthouse” employs a lighthouse structure as a metaphor for consciousness, and addresses the relationship between raw sensation and perception. Outside the boundary wall, we see the world of natural phenomena. There are stars reflected in the stormy sea, along with the red rays of a sunset. Birds sing, the trees bloom and seasons change. An apple falls. Inside the lighthouse wall, the interpretation of these events is illuminated in rich detail. A path is traced from the falling apple to a diagram of the earth’s gravity holding the moon in orbit, from the sunset to the spinning earth, from the seasons to the earth orbiting the sun. The stars are organized into constellations, and the cry of birds into music.

Berry clearly enjoys playing with a variety of representational modes, combining the architectural conventions of plan and elevation, astronomical diagrams, and cartographic symbols. At times the orientation shifts upside down and sideways, recalling old maps, with networks of paths or roads connecting pictorial locations. But the places depicted here are structures of the mind – elements of a jumbled social belief system where the perspectives of science and religion, nature and culture, frequently describe different paths to truth. While driven by their own internal narrative, these works aspire to raise questions rather than to answer them, and to provoke the viewer’s own journey through terrain which is at once familiar and foreign.

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