Berry lives in
London and portrays the city he is surrounded by depicting the changing urban life
Collage, and while not using
quilting techniques many quilters follow Berry and he is often mentioned in that context.
Behind Closed Doors Berry's 2016 London solo show was a success. The gallery had said "it's easy to get carried away with the novelty of the medium and forget that, first and foremost, Ian Berry is an artist with something to say. Well, in this two-part show he is speaking loud and clear". Art Critic
Tabish Khan wrote it was a top 5 London Exhibition for Fad magazine 'What Berry can do with denim is astonishing. He creates multi-layered paintings, his attention to detail is superb and this exhibition is an impressive feat'.
My Beautiful Laundrette By the end of the 1970s, there were around 12,500 launderettes in the country. That number has now slumped to 3,000, with 450 in London. During one photoshoot, Berry went back to a launderette he had only visited on a recce the week before only to discover it boarded up. Berry portrayed the interior of launderettes in
Crisp Street Market,
Poplar,
Bow,
Ladbroke Grove and
Holloway Road in London. The body of work was a comment on the declining launderettes and what they meant to the community they served. The title of the show was borrowed from a film based on the screenplay of
Hanif Kureishi, and shot in the mid 80s.
My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by
Stephen Frears, captured a mood London at the time, the cultural tensions and the economic change but central to the film was the
laundrette, one scene depicts a crowd of customers gathering outside, impatient to be let in. Laundrettes are now no longer like this. The 'showstopper'
Secret Garden This interactive installation, titled the Secret Garden, was a piece that the viewer could walk through, on top of a denim path that was filled with various flowers and plants, from
roses to
cacti,
wisteria to
chrysanthemum that hung down like a
trellis. It was shown at the
Children's Museum of the Arts New York in 2017. The installation for the Bridge Project was inspired by thinking of childhood. Immediately Berry thought of playing outside at his
Yorkshire hometown. He believed children play less outside and interact and look less at the nature around. Children have new technology with iPads. He had stated that while he was making the Behind Closed Doors piece, he was thinking of a woman with a perfect home but the children had grown up, leaving the nest empty. The home depicted in the picture, there was a garden at the back. It made him think of the garden being full of the laughter of kids playing once upon a time and now the empty nest. As children would come to the garden in denim with their parents he wanted them to look at being in a garden differently and as in New York seek out a Community Garden together. He wanted to draw attention to the community gardens as a meeting place and a location to enjoy being outside. Berry also used some of the last fabric that the USA had produced to make the installation. After 112 years of production, Cone Mills, a historic denim mill in America, announced it would close its White Oak plant in
North Carolina. As the last major manufacturer of
selvage denim in the United States, its final products served as relics for newer generations to learn about in this exhibition. It was also used as an example of sustainability. Berry worked with Tonello, the Italian laundry manufacturer and technology company. He used their laser machines in this work to cut many of the pieces made for the trellis, and used the ozone washing to colour the denim. These are now some of the new tools for the denim industry. In the opening to the garden, Berry shows a
cotton plant and explained that this is where the jeans we wear first comes from. The headline was from
plants to pants, to plants again. it was chosen as a top exhibition to see by Tabish Khan writing for Londonist.
Record Store In 2013 Berry turned the gallery into a vintage
record store. It was in response to the changing High Street and the loss of a lot of independent
Record Stores in the UK, where many in the
music community and like minded people would meet. The whole of the gallery window was turned into a
vinyl store. It was filled with records, tee shirts, records and framed albums. It wasn't just any albums however, they were all chosen for their connection to the denim story.
Rock and Roll music and denim have gone together through time. With
Elvis to
heavy metal,
Bob Dylan,
hippies and
punk, the pioneers of youth music have worn jeans. Many of the most famous album covers of all time feature this artisan fabric: the
Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, and
Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA for example. In 1975, the musicians who hung around a New York bar called
CBGB started to crop their hair and rip their jeans. The look was spotted by musician and designer
Malcolm McLaren, who adapted it into punk back in London with the
Sex Pistols. Berry was portraying much of this history. He spoke with
Robert Elms about the albums, who he had met most of the people and bands depicted in the albums. Warhol said of the denim: "I wish I could invent something like blue jeans. Something to be remembered for". Of course, he went on to design the jeans close-up cover for the Stones' Sticky Fingers album. In 2018, Berry brought the Record Store back together in the US to make a whole high street, including the launderette (changed to Laundromat) and the Secret Garden (changed to a community garden) together with a gallery showing some of Berry's pieces. and the CCTV Surveillance piece. == Portraits ==