Dorothy Berry

Dorothy Berry (born 1942) is an Australian artist working in the genres of Outsider art, and Art Brut, based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. She is known primarily for her densely composed depictions of animals and birdlife, executed in pastel. Berry resides in the Melbourne suburb of Kingsbury and has worked from her Northcote-based studio at Arts Project Australia since 1985. Berry's work has been represented in four solo exhibitions, and has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally in group shows, including ‘My Puppet, My Secret Self’, at the Substation, Newport; ‘Inside Out/Outside In’, Access Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and ‘Turning the Page’, Gallery 101, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and MADMusée, Liège, Belgium, and the Centre for Australian Art.

Early life and education Berry is primarily a self-taught artist who attributes her artistic talents to her mother. Since 1985 she has maintained a studio at Arts Project Australia (APA), an organization devoted to supporting and promoting artists living with an intellectual disability. The APA does not provide training but rather, provides access to fine art materials. Although her work has thematically changed very little over the course of her career she substituted pastel for paint as the preferred medium for her work during the early years of her studio residency at APA. Berry's first solo exhibition followed shortly thereafter, in 1996. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, she attended weekly life-drawing classes at the School of Art at Phillip Institute of Technology (now RMIT University).

Career, themes and style Berry's work is described in the popular press as both “instinctive” and “spontaneous,” Recurring themes in her work are animals, birds, and religion, for the course of her career. Maxine Ryder, who collaborated with Berry in her early years and returned to Australia to curate a retrospective exhibition of her work twenty years later, remarks on the autobiographical nature of Berry's work, noting that her bird imagery is most likely a form of self-portraiture and that the recurring themes of marriage and motherhood in her self-portraits are a response to her acquired disability. Arts writer Samantha Wilson notes that Berry's work "goes from simple line drawings to crowded larger works always with a certain clarity about the images that she wants to depict, from the segmented women’s bodies in the autobiographical section, to the darker, more solid palettes of her depictions of religious figures and nuns."

Home, locations around Arts Centre Melbourne, the city and the surrounds, 2015 Melbourne Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1994 – 2014 Renegades: Outsider Art, national touring exhibition, 2013 - 2014 Into the Vault and Out of the Box, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2014 Repeat. Restate…Reiterate, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2013 My Puppet, My Secret Self, The Substation, Newport, 2012 Halo and the Glory of Art, McGlade Gallery, ACU Sydney, 2011 - 2012 This Sensual World, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne, 2011 Human Nature, Alan Lane Community Gallery; Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool, 2010 Fully Booked, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2010 By Hand, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2009 Snapshot, ACGA Gallery, Federation Square, Melbourne, 2009 Pearls of Arts Project Australia: The Stuart Purves Collection, National touring exhibition, 2007 - 2009 The Year of the Bird, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, NSW, 2008 Reaching Out, Waldron Hall, County Court of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008 A Lucid Moment, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2007 Yours, Mine and Ours: 50 Years of ABC TV, Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, Emu Plains, NSW, 2006 Leo Cussen with Selected Artists, Australian Galleries, Collingwood, Melbourne, 2005 S,M,L,XL, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2005 Home Sweet Home: Works from the Peter Fay Collection, international touring exhibition (Australia and New Zealand), 2004 - 2005 Exchange, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2004 A Sense of Place, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2003 Chic, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2002 Life Stories, Arts Project Australia, 2001 Histoire de vivre, l’Orangerie du Luxembourg, Paris, France, 2000 On Track, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 2000 Connexions Particulières, MADMusée and Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Liège, Belgium, 1999 Bazaar, Pitspace, RMIT, Bundoora, Melbourne, 1998 Prints & Artists’ Books, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 1997 Cut it Out, Collaboration with Maxine Ryder, Arts Project Australia Gallery, Melbourne, 1995 Art des Antipodes, MADMusée, Liège, Belgium, 1995 Vita Gallery, Oregon, USA, 1995 Beyond Words VicHealth Access Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, 1994 MADMusée, Liège, Belgium, 1993 Inside Out/Outside In, Access Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992

Publications Cheryl Daye (ed.) Dorothy Berry: Bird on a Wire, exhibition catalogue, Arts Project Australia, Melbourne, 2009.