MATERIAL WORLD | Short Film

Watch the film clip of Ian Berry at the Textil Museet Exhibition during the install of Material World. Filmed by Amelia Finngåård on location see the interview as well as him installing the work, alongside images of the show including clips of the collaborations with TWOOD and Jonathan Christopher.

Ian Berry använder recyklad denim i sina verk. Vid första anblicken är det lätt att missta Ians verk för att vara blåtonade eller indigofärgade fotografier. Vid en närmare titt ser en att verken består av lager på lager av denim i olika nyanser. Läs mer om utställningen här: https://textilmuseet.se/utstallningar...

Ian Berry Material World Review

Paradise Lost at Textil Museet, Sweden

From Elle Sweden to the Telegraph in the UK, there was a number of articles and reviews or Material World at Textil Museet, the National Textile Museum of Sweden. Borås Tidning printed several articles but we thought we’d share this one from art critic Agnes Brusk Jahn, translated from Swedish.

Fascinating jeans art at Textilmuseet

Ian Berry’s exhibition shows an extraordinary eye for nuances, says BT:s reviewer Agnes Brusk Jahn.

The last couple of years it’s been a lot of talk about recycling, upcycling and circular fashion. The more that’s exposed about the textile industry’s heavily negative impact on the environment, the more initiatives have come to change the industry. Even if some of them are pure greenwashing, most of them are innovative and hopeful. The denim artist Ian Berry on the other hand, ends up in a category of his own.

Ian Berry’s work is art, not fashion. Not because the two can’t go hand in hand – the artist has in the exhibition cooperated with the fashion designer Jonathan Christopher, who has designed incomparable garments in response to selected art works, and Lill O Sjoberg, with the innovation twood (textile-wood) where old denim becomes a hybrid between textile and wood.

Ian Berry collects old jeans fabric and creates artwork of it. At a distance his “tavlor”, if that’s the correct word, may look like denim fabric that the artist has painted in different shades. But if you move closer you realize that every shadow, light shift, motive and silhouette is a piece of fabric of its own in exactly the right shade, that has been attached to another, and another, to create the motive the artist wants. A city train on elevated rail. An almost empty pub. A swimming body, whose shape changes by the movements of the water. He makes skin shine and metal glisten. It is outstanding.

His extraordinary eye for nuances and shadows is complemented, in addition to craftsmanship, by the artistic eye for the motives he chooses. Reflections in a calm pool. A lonely girl in an empty hallway. Cityscapes.

The use of denim is no coincidence. He is interested in the denim garment’s role in history and our lives. How they became a standing feature in each person’s wardrobe after they reached icon status because famous musicians and actors wore them, something he illustrates with an enormous installation outside the exhibition room, where he has depicted famous jeans icons of all times, surrounded by LP records and plants. All in denim.

In addition to the artwork on the walls in the dark exhibition room, flowering vegetation is hanging down from the ceiling and creates a jungle around the visitor, as a felicitous reminder of the natural origin of the jeans: the cotton plant and the indigo plant. In the middle of the jungle is Jonathan Christopher’s most beautiful creation standing, a flowering dress that is climbing up and into Ian Berry’s installation.

With the artworks and the well thought through cooperations, the exhibition becomes both a fascinating art experience in itself and a reminder of endless opportunities when it comes to reuse of the resources we already have. Especially if art, curiosity, power of innovation and crafts can cooperate.