Elizabeth Berrien

Elizabeth Berrien is the godmother of the contemporary wire sculpture movement, she was born in 1950. All her life, she had an attraction for animals. As a child she would stretch out on the lawn for hours, studying the goings-on of ants and other small insects. She would gently catch honey bees with her bare hands, hold them awhile, and let them go again. At age five, gazing at the ceiling during nap time, she visualized a long line looping back on it. Picking up two pencils and a ball of string, she invented a crude form of knitting to make a tiny blanket for her pet turtle. The turtle rejected the gift, but Berrien continues to pioneer new uses for fibre.

By preschool, Elizabeth was an avid reader. Her scores for spatial relationships and math were "off the scale;" later she skipped fourth grade. At age thirteen Elizabeth Berrien was admitted to Mensa, the "genius society", where she had a memorable meeting with Buckminster Fuller. As a high school sophomore she came in sixth in a state-wide math competition, against a field of juniors and seniors. Her love for plane geometry and topology were vital to her later explorations of wire sculpture.

In high school, Elizabeth had difficulty expressing her creatively. She could see the energy lines that made animals beautiful, but couldn't translate them on paper. Decades later, she would learn that she was born left-handed. When her efforts at drawing and painting ended in frustration, Elizabeth abandoned all hope of ever expressing herself as an artist.

Placed in a sculpture class against her vociferous objections, Elizabeth came under the influence of a teacher Kenneth. Under his astute tutelage, Elizabeth developed a whole new approach to art - to stop struggling against that which did not work, and start exploring areas which did work. Mr. Curran trained Elizabeth to train herself, using a lifelong technique of creative problem-solving (one good problem, properly solved, should spawn at least ten good new problems).

Curran made Elizabeth class monitor, freeing her from fixed class assignments and stipulating that areas were more satisfactory than works on paper, Berrien was still seeking a comfort zone. At last, Curran gave her a roll of wire, telling her, "Here, kid, take this wire and mess with it". Using wire as a mobile inklines was comforting - if a line wouldn't do what she wanted, she could tweak it around til she liked it better. Berrien still has her first crude wire sculpture, from 1968: Picasso's Cat. Her parents hid it for years so she wouldn't throw it out.

 

While Kenneth Curran recommended art school to many of his pupils, Elizabeth Berrien was not among them. In his words, "You'd have a lousy time, kid. They'd think you were too obsessive over the wire, and they'd want you to balance it out with all that other stuff that gave you so much grief. Besides, 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."

 Mr Curran past away and even though he has, she still goes to the school to get an insight.