Tia Maria Taylor Berry: Unquenchable Spirit

Tia Maria Taylor Berry is passionate about rejection. She talks about it excitedly, her eyes glowing with near-missionary zeal. She is even a member of a two-person rejection club. They meet virtually on a regular basis and share a list of their most recent rejections for residencies or other endeavours. They give themselves ten minutes to mourn and then they resolve to move on and talk about future plans.

In this day and age, where all our successes are celebrated on social media for the world to see, rejections and failures remain hidden and unacknowledged, potentially inspiring depression, shame and even fatalism about the viability of one’s path. Yet for Tia, rejection is a sign of life, vitality and motivation. It means that she’s working, that she’s strategising, thinking about her next move.

It’s her proof that she’s a working artist and sharing this sense of resilience in the classroom and the studio has been just one way in which she has been supporting students, preparing them to work as creative professionals, cultivating drive and tenacity. 

Don’t let her growing stack of rejections fool you: Northumberland-raised Tia has been very successful in her young career. The Freelands Studio Fellowship is one in a hearty line-up of shows and residencies in the UK and Norway, with more to follow as she spreads her wings with a Vermont-based residency in the US due in 2025.

Her studio fellowship at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University – located in lovely Aberdeen with its gleaming granite buildings – has allowed her to pursue a long-standing passion for teaching that she developed while working as a ‘subject champion’, teaching art to younger students during her A levels. This fellowship opportunity, to teach and create in a more unstructured studio environment, provided the space to focus on a unique and ambitious artistic project – one very close to her heart, that she feels may have been otherwise difficult to accomplish. 

Tia’s artistic focus resides in the domains of magic, enchantment and the dimensions of the unseen and numinous. Although explorations of art and magic have been gaining more attention in galleries and museums in the past decade, it is still an uncertain and risky path for many artists. As even though the spiritual dimensions of art are much more openly celebrated and explored by both artists and curators, there remains a prevailing opinion that relegates esoteric and magical art to a dark and superstitious corner of cultural expression, casting the current explosion of interest as merely a reaction to hard and uncertain times.

However, esoteric and magical art should more accurately be understood as a response to the human condition, practiced in all cultures throughout history; engaging bodies, emotions and super-sensual capacities.

Mediumistic art, such as the kind that Tia produces, is a particularly vulnerable practice as it requires the artist to engage in altered states of consciousness and methods of painting and drawing that involve trance and ecstasy, which is not always comfortable for educators and curators. We still privilege rationality, innovation and narratives of individual genius in our portrayals of artists. Discussions of entities, spirits and alternative planes of reality disrupt those cosy narratives. 

Tia’s primary artistic influences can be seen in the early spiritual abstractionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton and Emma Kunz, and in the work of contemporary magical artists such as the feminist collective known as Hilma’s Ghost. For Tia they form a spiritual and artistic lineage and a community of ancestral spirits and living inspirations with whom she feels connected.

Swiss visionary artist Emma Kunz (1892–1963) holds a particular fascination. Kunz was a medium and a healer whose precise geometrical drawings were created by a pendulum that she used to mark and connect nodes of energy which she believed expressed deep patterns of the universe. Tia shares with Kunz a long-standing interest in the creation of spiritual spaces, ritual and portals.

Previous projects include large-scale, crisp abstractions painted onto walls, or on large panelled yet intimate chambers, suggesting doors through which other dimensions may be experienced. Her pieces generally feature a strong central point that drives the eye, encouraging a somatic sense of focus, energetically activated by circles that vibrate with a recurring motif of writhing worm-like patterns, suggesting vortices of swirling energy.

Tia’s primary project during her fellowship elaborated on her interest in esoteric spaces, contracting the scale with the construction of a geometric abstracted tarot deck. This project was personal, as she and her family all read tarot cards; once again stressing the role of human threads and communities of practice to her work.

The construction of a 78-card tarot deck is no small commitment. It requires several different faculties: right brain and left brain, analytical and intuitive. It is not a casual undertaking. It needs research and command of a complex symbol set, penetrating the heart of the history of the cards themselves, while cultivating the connection with the subconscious mind. While today tarot decks and oracle decks are ubiquitous and easily available, historically it was the mark of a true mage to create their own deck. 

Tia’s starting point for the creation of her cards was the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, which was the first mass-produced deck and the one that has shaped the visual language of tarot since it was made available in 1909. 

As she described her process of creating the cards, Tia would sit quietly and meditate on each individual card, exploring its formal qualities and letting its inner reality become known to her intuitively. Then she would put the card away to begin her own work, creating each card in a single sitting.

Overall, the deck is bright and delicate, a rippling chorus of jewel tones and sunny primary colours. Each card is elegantly balanced and taken as a whole; the deck feels like a wondrous set of instructional diagrams hailing from another world.

While the traditional 'Fool' card pictures a youth breezily perched on a cliff’s edge, Tia’s 'Fool' features an abstracted meeting point of a fulcrum and a ledge, perhaps representing a moment of consequential change. The gold and the blue that dominate the original Rider–Waite–Smith 'Fool' card are there, but only as a gentle touchpoint. Similarly, Tia’s 'High Priestess' suggests the architecture of the original card, but the reader is forced to reckon with colour, shape and structure to guide their interpretation.

The cards of the Minor Arcana, also known as the suit cards of cups, swords, wands and pentacles, representing the elements of water, air, fire and earth respectively, are filled with elemental motion, yet each card still draws the viewer inward, returning to that strong, central focal point. Despite the magnitude of this project, it is nevertheless intimate.

Through the work, Tia dares to show the world a deep part of herself via a practice that involves entering trance states. This revealing and vulnerability are traits that she brings back into the classroom. In addition to conducting workshops on formal techniques related to her own practice, such as hard-edged geometric painting, she has genuinely benefited from the critique sessions that have been central to her emerging pedagogy which balances self-care and motivation.

These critical exchanges encourage artists to articulate and defend the language of their work while providing opportunities for deep encounters with other people’s artistic practice, encouraging reciprocity and growth for both her and her students.

Tia has thrived in having a platform to support students to be courageous and accept criticism, not just with grace but also with enthusiasm. She notes that feedback is crucial for any artist, and learning to incorporate feedback without taking it personally is an important skill for students to learn. She feels that this is a key element of building success and artistic development that is often overlooked. Cultivating a safe environment for this sort of personal growth is the mark of a true mentor, one who is confident enough to genuinely invest in others.

Tia finds that expansive space in herself through her fearlessness and in the inspired precision and excellence that she brings to her practice. She may also find some strength in the community of magical, artistic, ancestral spirits who provide inspiration, and perhaps even guidance, through an invisible thread which she knows connects her to something bigger. 

Tia Taylor Berry creates works which seek to transcend the limitations of knowingness and conventional understanding, into a space of otherworldly wonder.

Specialising in geometric abstraction, with a focus on shape and colour, Taylor Berry seeks to distill the complexity of spiritual space into its purest geometric forms - triangles, circles, and diamonds are recurring motifs in her work.

Employing the use of mediumistic techniques such as automatic drawing, seance and divination, the work is created through an experienced shift in state of being. In these liminal spaces of the work’s creation Taylor Berry connects with that which is beyond the tangible, bridging the chasm between the material and the ethereal. 

Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based writer specialising in the intersections of magic and culture with contemporary and modern art. 

Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school. The 2024 Fellowship concluded with a group exhibition titled 'Enfold, Unfurl’, held in March 2025.