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By recycling different visions of the
world, past and present, Berrini hopes to capture her
nostalgia for the places that she has not been to. "The
creation of maps has historically been a painstaking
process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly
create a separate world from the scraps of my current
fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to
me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not
know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing."
- Francesca Berrini |
Francesca Berrini transforms vintage maps of
places she has longed to visit into fine art maps of
entirely new and imagined worlds. She obsessively tears up
original vintage maps into tiny pieces, and then
reconstitutes them, using a painterly process, into new maps
and directional devices that reflect a longing for places
unseen.
At first glance, from afar, Berrini's works look like a
collection of high-quality maps and atlases with unfamiliar
continents and geographic markings. As you examine the
details of the maps a bit closer, and try to follow the
geographic and geopolitical information displayed, you do a
double-take as you realize that the maps themselves are
actually constructed from miniscule pieces of other maps,
forming new terrain, new geographies, and new names of
places in entirely new languages. Berrini maintains the
abstract language of maps, yet plays with our notions of
their unspoken authority and overall usability.
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Francesca Berrini's Artist Statement:
Since the start of my exploration into mapmaking, I have
become increasingly fascinated by the intersection of
manmade and natural forms made visible in maps and atlases.
The combination of the colorful geometry of political
divisions laid over the organic forms of the continents is
as incongruous in appearance as our actual physical
interventions in the natural landscape. In looking at a
series of maps of the same area throughout time it is easy
to see the fluid movement of people and their political
structures. While human boundaries and routes of travel
shift and vary, features of the landscape seem to remain
solid underneath the flow of humanity. Maps are always only
a glimpse of a moment in history, a self portrait of the
time in which they are made. And yet, maps consistently
reflect the influence that humans have had in altering their
own surroundings. Whether calculated in the slow growth of
reclaimed land in Japan or the Netherlands, or in the
accidental change of geological features such as the
creation of the Salton Sea or the erasing of coastal
marshlands on the gulf coast, our cumulative effect adds up
to astounding changes in our natural environs. I see my work
as a small reflection of this attempt to chart and control
our surroundings. A careful imitation of how the human hand
is made visible on the landscape as viewed by the seemingly
all knowing eye of the mapmaker. In each piece, I attempt to
create an illusion of factuality and to capture a nostalgia
for the idea of far away places. Both subtly by the
combination of paper qualities, and overtly by the
introduction of images and text, it is the initial illusion
of actual information that makes the eye accept my distorted
combinations at first glance.
Artist Bio:
Francesca Berrini is a visual artist whose sculptural and
two dimensional work explores innovative combinations of
found materials. Whether working with scraps of metal or old
schoolbooks, her process transforms them into pieces that
carry an evocative sense of place and history. She is
influenced equally by her study in the Furniture Design
Program at the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as her
professional experiences as a metal fabricator and finisher.
Her work has been featured on the cover of the Stranger and
Tablet weekly newspapers, as well as in the pages of Rivet,
The Seattle Weekly, The Seattle Post Intelligencer, and a
book of anti-war signs published in both the United States
and Europe. She currently lives and maintains a studio near
Portland, Oregon.
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