Sharon Berke
We are very pleased to feature the work of Sharon Berke. Sharon works as a painter, collage and mixed media artist. Her works have been exhibited in museums and galleries including the National Association of Women Artists, Inc., NAWA Gallery, New York, NY Annual Scollay Square Exhibit, Boston City Hall, Cambridge Art Association and the Menino Arts Center, Hyde Park, MA. Additionally Sharon has been known to create artful delicious cakes.
I recently became acquainted with Sharon and her work and kept finding myself returning to her photographic collage and related paintings. A child of adoption, Sharon digs into imagery around the home. Furnishings, cabinets windows, houseplants. Kitchen tables, carpets, flooring, all colliding and connecting. Also disconnecting. Sharon’s look into this domestic setting in a broken, scattered yet connected way that gives us an insight into how a person may feel in an adopted home setting. Also colorful and kinetic, an abstract personal story emerges.
-Steven Duede, Fine Art Photography/Mixed Media, Aspect Gallery Principal.
I create visual dissonance by fragmenting objects and interior spaces. My process begins by cutting up images from interior design books. Elements from scenes stimulate associations…
REARRANGEMENT SERIES
My current artwork explores ideas relating to having been adopted at birth: identity, duality, home, family, separation, connection and belonging. In my Rearrangement series, paintings and collages of abstracted domestic scenes serve as personal narratives.
I create visual dissonance by fragmenting objects and interior spaces. My process begins by cutting up images from interior design books. Elements from scenes stimulate associations: furniture groupings with familial relations, plants with growth, patterns and colors with moods. I combine selected pieces to form a symbolic arrangement. Fragmented spaces relate to dis/connection and sense of place in my adoptive and birth families. The collages often inspire paintings, where I build on the story. I often play with contrasts, such as interior vs. exterior, formal vs. playful and familiar vs. mysterious. In my most recent works, I have begun thinking about shrines and devotional arrangements. Ultimately, I create to understand and surprise myself.
Sharon Berke
Sharon Berke is a visual artist who makes semi-abstract paintings. Raised with her two brothers in Euclid, Ohio by her math-teacher father and her feminist mother, she identified as an artist from the beginning, due both to her mom’s steadfast encouragement and to genetics—both her birthparents are artists.
After earning her BFA in 1991 in painting and printmaking from Kent State University, she spent the rest of her 20s traveling and working in framing, catering and gardening. In 1996, she moved to Boston, MA to pursue the study of Sign Language Interpretation, which led her to a job as caption writer at WGBH. In 1998, she met both her birth parents, which settled her mind and informed her art.
She met her husband on a fundraising bike trip, and after two years of bonding and traveling, they had two boys, both of whom Sharon home schooled through elementary school. Approaching 50, Sharon realized she needed to return to serious artmaking, and began her Rearrangements series. She lives in Jamaica Plain, MA with her family.
Visit Sharon Berke.