Element of Portal 2

Tia Taylor Berry

Guest Curator - What Artists Like 3

Spotlight: Tia awarded the Freelands Foundation Studio Fellowship

In 2024 Tia Taylor Berry completed a 4 week residency in Alvik, Norway (January 2024) and in February started a 12 month fellowship as the Freelands Studio Fellow at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen, where she has been teaching whilst also maintaining a studio practice and creating her artist Tarot deck. In 2025, Tia will open her solo show in Aberdeen in partnership with the Freelands Foundation (13th January 2025, this is also the official release date of her Tarot deck). She has work included in a group exhibition at The Freelands Foundation in London (March 2025), plus has been awarded a fully funded Vermont studio center fellowship, in Vermont, New Hampshire, USA (To begin March 2025).

Tia Taylor Berry paints the texture of the mind. The broadly sensed motion of ideas, feelings and substance are rendered in a carefully curated colour palette, of subtle vitality. The absorption of the painter is evident in her process of mark-making, and harmonising the geometric forms. Plato identified five 3-D shapes he maintained were the basis of stability for the whole universe; above his famous Academy for philosophers he had the words set Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here. The spiritual geometry of this artist's paintings is more egalitarian, based on an openness to unknowing as much as knowing.  

These works speak to contemporary artist Frank Stella’s renowned geometric abstractions – but as they developed later in his career into more free flowing works. Taylor Berry’s aesthetic is one of deep involvement: that of the artist in making, that of the viewer in participating; an effective synchronicity achieved through balance, proportion, scale. Suspend, expand, transcend: these works provide the structure of the viewer to let go.