Terry Berlier

Website: https://www.terryberlier.com/TBFP/

Bio: Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. She has exhibited in solo and group shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia including the Marc Chagall National Museum in France, Museum of Old and New Art in Australia, Babel Gallery in Norway, Contemporary Art + Spirits in Osaka, Japan, EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Creative Work Fund Grant, Stanford Faculty Creative Project Seed Grant, Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the California Council for the Humanities California Stories Fund, the Millay Colony for Artists in New York, and the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship. Her work has been reviewed in the Art in America, BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, published in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ University of California Press, and ‘Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and The Artworks it Inspired’. Her sound sculptures can be heard on Earthly Records “A Kind Of Ache” with Sarah Hennies and The Living Earth Show. Berlier is a Professor of Art, by Courtesy Professor of Music, Director of the Sculpture Lab, and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 2007. Berlier has served on the Recology Artist in Residence Advisory Board since 2012 following her residency there.

Statement: I became fascinated by the way a Möbius loop (a form which rejects binaries) can embody ‘desire lines’, marks left on the ground when one veers from the normative path, as a queer ecological phenomena. This non-orientable form is laborious to construct through wood: cutting, laminating, joining, sanding, embracing failure, and rerouting as the forms evolved, causing the Möbius to flip at a certain point. Gender, joinery, and ecology are combined in an incongruous way.