Francesca Berrini

Francesca Berrini lives in Portland, OR, and deconstructs and reconstitutes found maps using the process of collage. Her work offers the reassuring sense of place maps provide, the viewer soon discovers that any effort of place recognition is futile. These places, comprised of torn, roughly half-inch square map remnants, are purely fictional. And every miniscule ribbon of road or tributary of river or border of province is still made to connect into one sinuous line over the course of perhaps hundreds of tiny scraps. What compounds are richly textured quilts of landmasses, oceans, deserts, rivers, and cities that exist solely in the artist’s imagination. Berrini’s maps reflect an interest in man’s transient inflictions upon nature: arbitrary borders, routes of travel, titles of places.

She says: “The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing.”

AND she's a roller derby girl. That's right.