Ian Berry's Secret Garden at Garden Museum London
A magical urban secret garden crafted from denim to delight kids and adults alike. Walk through the denim garden path and find roses, cacti, wisteria and dangling vines made with layers of recycled denim jeans and discover a brand new pond with koi and waterlilies all hand cut from shades of jeans.
Ian Berry’s Secret Garden has been show around the world in Musuems and galleries and this is the first time a site specific, stand alone installation has shown in the UK and will be exhibited in the Garden Museum’s central Nave space which is open and free to the public.
Ian Berry in the Secret Garden at the Garden Museum by Sam Hockley
Transforming denim which comes from cotton, a material made from plants, back into a new vegetal form, the installation will explore themes of sustainability in the textile industries and the importance of access to green spaces in the city for young minds.
As you wander through you will begin to discover some of the artwork from the young children that Ian Berry worked with in Kirklees in West Yorkshire with Shape North and find their drawings of their hopes and dreams for the future intertwined into the installation.
a part of the all denim pond by Ian Berry at Garden Museum
The Secret Garden will be viewable 13 July – 8 September, as well as during a number of family and community events at the Garden Museum throughout the summer. This will include the museum’s free community open day Neighbours Day on 14 July and the Festival of Fairytales on 11 August. An accompanying programme of activities and workshops for all ages inspired by the installation will be offered free of charge, including textile flower collage, denim rag rug, clay and felt cacti making and cyanotype printing.
Ian Berry: The Secret Garden and accompanying events are made possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England.
Garden Museum - 5 Lambeth Palace Road - London SE1 7LB
16 July - 8 Sept 2024
Free Entry
About the Garden Museum
The Garden Museum explores and celebrates the art, history and design of British gardens and their place in our lives today.
Visitors will discover the stories of great gardeners through a permanent collection of artefacts and tools from gardening throughout history alongside botanical art, photography, and paintings exploring how and why we garden. Exhibitions, events, and community projects delve into art, architecture, plant science, food, sustainability, well-being and more, all through the lens of gardening.
Housed in the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, the Garden Museum contains the burial place of John Tradescant, an early gardener and plant hunter. To preserve his tomb, the Garden Museum was founded by Rosemary Nicholson, an admirer of Tradescant, in 1977. At the heart of the Museum is a sheltered courtyard garden designed by Dan Pearson as an ‘Eden’ of rare plants.
Ian Berry and Tonello nominated for Film Award!
Ian Berry and Tonello have been nominated for an inaugural Blue Lenz Award in the Best Sustainability video category for 2021!
The short documentary was filmed in Italy at Tonello HQ by Stefano Gnata who followed the process of creating the Secret Garden for a special installation at the San Fran Flower Mart in San Francisco. Filming the washing and lazering of the special Cone Denim fabric and the creation of the vines, flowers and wisteria that goes in to creating the hanging trellis. Alice Tonello, the Marketing Manager and head of R&D, along with Ian Berry were interviewed prior to the installing of the piece in California in 2018.
Blue Lenz YouTube channel has amassed a library of videos that spans educational to inspirational content around the denim community. They feature a community of creators including mills, consultants, designers and industry insiders who contribute to making this channel a go-to resource for denim.
Blue Lenz was founded to provide a more evergreen, centralized space for the outstanding content being produced. With more than 300 videos live on the channel, they thought it was time to recognize some of the best denim videos featured on Blue Lenz.
For the first time, Blue Lenz Denim Video Awards will be hosted during Bluezone later this month in Munich, Germany.
Click the images to see images of the final result in San Francisco.
Ian Berry said.
“It’s great to get this mention amongst so many great videos clips and all promoting good causes and ethics. I’m particularly pleased for Tonello who put so much work into the collaboration and support me greatly to get a nomination from an industry they are central to. And also good luck to my friends at Carved in Blue/Lenzing/Tencel who have put so much effort into bringing the industry together and now with these Blue Lenz awards. Of course both have supported me over a number of years and along with Pepe Jeans and Cone Denim have been great partners, not least at the latest museum show at Museum Rijswijk in The Netherlands. It will be no shame coming a runner up to any of these films created.”
The other nominees in the section are :
Best Sustainability – Connection to the UN SDGs
True Cost of Apparel Industry – BBC/Mostafiz Uddin
Artistic Fabric Mills – Tracing the Lifecycle of a Jean – SDG 12
Tonello x Ian Berry – Secret Garden @ San Francisco Flower Market
Jeanologia – Handman – The Revival of Jeans Manufacturing
Artistic Milliners – Organic Cotton in Pakistan
“Over the past several years, we have seen increasing use of video to explain denim design, history, environmental and social impact,” said Lenzing’s Tricia Carey. “With the pandemic, videos became a way to connect globally as we have had limited in-person meetings. With this in mind, we believe the denim industry needs to celebrate the incredible creativity, people and concepts. This led to the start of our Blue Lenz YouTube channel several years ago and now to the first denim video awards to showcase the best video storytelling of the global denim community.“
They enlisted a panel of seven judges who hail from around the globe to pick and choose the cream of the crop:
Margherita Verlicchi, Menabo – Italy
Michelle Branch, Markt & Twigs – United States
Wouter Munnichs, Long John Denim – Netherlands
Neha Celly, Nece Gene – India
Erin Barajas, Interesting Monsters – United States
Panos Sofianos, Bluezone – Germany and Greece
Kelly Harrington, Trademark Blue – United Kingdom
The awards cover eight categories. In addition to bragging rights, the winners will receive a certificate, and they will be featured during an awards presentation at Bluezone in Munich, Germany.
If you’re attending Bluezone, join us on Aug. 31 at 3 pm CET as we announce the winners live during a ceremony. They’ll also be sharing a video of the presentation on their Carved in Blue Instagram.
Ian Berry opens 'Hotel California' at the Catto Gallery
Guests at the opening of Hotel California at the Catto Gallery. Credit Gökhan Göksoy
Ian Berry opened his Hotel California exhibition with his work made of only denim jeans to great acclaim. By the end of the day, all the work was sold. Attendees all agreed that the work has to be seen in real life and so many were taken about by this new body of work, where Ian turned denim to water in the bright Californian sun.
London also basked in the sunny sunday day that reflected the new radiant work of Ian’s collages of blue jeans. The first show Ian has had with the Catto since his groundbreaking Behind Closed Doors body at the end of 2016 this much anticipated show almost sold out before the doors opened, and the rest soon were taken by eager collectors.
photo by Gökhan Göksoy
You can see more pictures of the opening here
Ian also showcases two of his installation, with the Record Store bridging the gap between the Hotel California album cover by the Eagles with the Hotel and pool themes and his much written about Secret Garden covered the Heath Street windows of the gallery making many a passer by stop in their tracks.
Photos of the art in context in the gallery
Secret Garden London
The show now continues until July 28 at
CATTO GALLERY
100 Heath Street London, NW3 1DP
Monday - Saturday 10 - 6pm
Sunday 12.30 - 6pm
The Secret Garden Live on the Mother Nature Network.
Ian Berry's Secret Garden at the CMA was live on the Mother Nature Network with Starre Vartan interviewing Museum Curator Jil Weinstock and Newlin Tillotson head of Social Media.
Ian Berry in New York Museum show
Ian Berry at the Children's Museum of Arts in New York
We have just returned to London after a busy December in the States. Ian had shows at Miami Basel and then he was in New York to open his Secret Garden Installation at the Children's Museum of the Arts in Manhattan.
Over many days Ian and a team of helpers installed this incredible Secret Garden installation at the Chelsea based Museum. The museum that has served hundreds of thousands of Children and has the mission 'to introduce children and their families to the transformative power of the arts by providing opportunities to make art side-by-side with working artists.'
And over the years, Ian has had a similar mission. He has worked with schools to do projects, and teachers write to him when they do lessons on him. He enjoys getting mails from kids who have made work inspired by him.
'I remember growing up in the north of England, I don't really remember getting much inspiration of artists working. Yes, they are there, but I didnt see it. It was more the 'local artist' normally retired amatuer you'd come across. But one day my dad took me to David Hockney's Saltaire at about 12 or 13 and it was so inspiring seeing someone from the same area I was from doing so well.'
Ian says he wishes he could be young again to go to somewhere like the CMA. It is a truly amazing place for young minds, and their parents. There are teaching artists there with many different work rooms, for all ages up to 16. They can learn to work in many different ways, often inspired by the artwork on display - Ellan Harvey also shows alongside Ians work. We think it is important for children to interact with Arts, especially with school budgets tightening and the arts being one of the biggest to suffer.
'crazy when you think both our countries excel in creative fields and really lead the world. Yet, we are constantly told at school that arts are a hobby with visions of the starving artist.' Ian Says.
The installation that you can walk through, on top of a denim path is filled with various flowers and plants, from roses to cacti, wisteria to chrysanthemum all made out of jeans. You'll find denim tools and also a hare, peering through, unafraid of the children about to run through.
But the most impressive part is the trellis coming down from the ceiling. Hundreds of vines and leaves dangling, as if taking over the museum. Part looking like a magical urban secret garden, part looking like the place has been abandoned and left for the nature to take over. The flowers hanging and the butterflies lead to an almost Alice in Wonderland fantasy world that the kids and parents alike have been amazed by.
The installation for the Bridge Project was inspired by thinking of childhood. Immediately Ian thought of playing outside at his Yorkshire hometown. He feels now children play less outside and interact and look less at the nature around. Kids are obsessed with tech with ipads and instant gratification and the games played are not with balls and dirty knees but with thumbs the only strength needed with video consoles.
'Sadly too I also feel that with the stresses of life parents even spend less time with their kids, even if they are with them, they may be distracted by their phones and the constant fear of missing something.'
'I only wonder what this may do to tiny minds seeing people always glued to their phones and screens'
He had noticed in the past that when recreating familiar scenes people took for granted, out of a material so common, people saw it differently and revalued it. He would love for the parent and child to walk through together so that when they do go through parks and gardens they will look at them more closely.
'I also thought that while in many other way New York would be one of the most inspiring cities for a child to live in, many kids wouldn't have gardens. Yes, there are places to go and famous parks with amazing open space and the High Line too, but perhaps it may inspire parents to find a little secret garden near to them'
In a interesting opening to the garden, Ian shows a cotton plant and explains that this is where the jeans we wear first comes from. Not bad going from plants to pants, to plants again.
Ian will return in April 2018 to help to take some classes based on his work.
We'd also like to place on record the thanks to the museum, Tonello, Cone denim, NYC factory and Christine Rucci for all the help in the making of the Secret Garden along with dozens of other assistants.
The installation is up until April.
Children's Museum of the Arts
103 Charlton St. NYC 212.274.0986
Ian Berry X Tonello
Ian Berry's Secret Garden at the Children's Museum of the Arts in New York would not have been possible without the kind and expert help of Tonello in Italy.
For 35 years they have been a reference point for the most important laundry and dyeing companies and for fashion brands all over the world. And now for artist Ian Berry. And we would like to place our thanks for their support.
“We have been researching, experimenting and innovating since 1981. And we do much more than just build ‘machines’.”
Forever evolving their Technology, together with the market, they are making always reliable, safe and sustainable technology that respects the environment and that consumes less energy, few additives, and indeed little of everything. They are behind ever improving production processes all without compromising on quality
Their garment finishing machines have become established over the world for the quality of their all-Italian manufacture, and for their flexibility and top-level performance. Everything that runs through the company has the thoughts of sustainability and the environment in mind and this combined with their creativity is what drew Ian and Tonello together.
photo by Lucinda Grange
Ian had known about the Laser Technology for some time, but considered it cheating, away from his all hand made art. But as larger and larger installations came about as well as noticing the advanced tech he had a change of heart.
'I've always been proud to say, it's made by just denim, glue and hands with scissors in, no bleach, no dye, no paint. It's been a very time consuming process making the work I do. I also saw the laser machine at first with its burnt marks and often looking flat. However, with the washing techniques of someone like Tonello it can really come alive. For me its an art form in itself. After meeting Alice Tonello and Alberto Lucchin a few times we thought it was a perfect time to look into how this could help in my art. Now I see it as a no brainer for things like this, and beside, its the tools that the denim industry is increasingly using so I can too.'
Ian is all too aware of the negative impacts of the denim industry on our planet and is pleased to have worked with a company such as Tonello who is working towards a brighter blue future with methods aimed to help the environmental impact. At their base in Italy Ian had the special Cone Denim washed and lasered with effects to create texture and then lasered much of what you see in the Trellis that hung from the Secret Garden. It would have taken Ian months to hand cut it all, 'beside, it wouldn't have stayed together.' Ian adds
'it is nice that it all went into creating something that environmentally is symbolic and pure, like plants and flowers. Matching the sustainable message, but also in a kids museum, that is the future and that is the future we want, a cleaner one for the future generations. But with the Creative Room, Tonello is all about sharing knowledge and education so I think they have been a perfect partner in this project.'
Tonello's Nicola Cioffi working on Ian's designs. Don't worry, these flames went down.
Ian with Alice Tonello, marketing and R&D head at Tonello and Flavio Tonello CEO Tonello at the Creative Room in Italy.
Tonello's Nicola Cioffi finding another purpose for Ian's designs.
The Creative Room at Tonello
The Creative Room in Sarcedo, Italy is a special place and a great idea, where technology and creatives can meet from all over the world. Ian visiting a couple of times in the Fall and was welcomed and amazed.
"Inspiring" is both the place – Tonello's new Creative Area – and a way of "being Tonello" today. It is the meeting point between technology and creativity, production and research. Tonello's creations and their experiments will find more and more space: to help clients discover the effects and treatments the machines and technology and to allow customers to undertand how to get the best out of their advanced equipment and to conceive fabrics, denim in particular, as 'canvases on which to paint dreams'.
Ian went to Tonello in Italy, in a region famed for denim and both times Ian was amazed to see the denim names walking through, here with Giovanni Petrin (and Alice Tonello), expert denim insider and former general manager of the Martelli Lavorazioni Tessili Italian specialized laundry and finishing company, who is now working for Crescent Bahuman Ltd (CBL), one of the major denim and garment manufacturers in Pakistan. It is great there is a place that is a melting pot for all these people.
News
News from the studio of Ian Berry
