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Home » News » The Denim Gardener: A Q&A with artist Ian Berry

The Denim Gardener: A Q&A with artist Ian Berry

This summer, artist Ian Berry has created a magical urban secret garden in the Garden Museum crafted from recycled denim to delight kids and adults alike. We asked Ian a few questions to get to know his life as an artist, how he made the installation and how he discovered his love for working with denim:

The Secret Garden installation at the Garden Museum, photo by Graham Lacdao

What was your journey to becoming an artist?

I took a very winding path less travelled to become an artist. I wanted to be an artist from a young age but when it came to it days before going to study art for university I changed to go to a course that led in to go to the creative side of advertising.

Despite being from the county that brought the world Hockney, Moore and Hepworth, I was always led to believe there was no future in art. I have no regrets of the route I took however and learned a lot with advertising, especially a work ethic and how to think. I was still making my art on the side and that is when I started to work with denim, after making a newspaper collage of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown out of newspaper I saw a pile of jeans in my childhood bedroom and thought I could create collages from denim with all the different shades, I didn’t have any reference points so had to teach myself ways of cutting and matching.

I went into adland but continued to make art well into the night and on the weekends. I ended up in Sydney working through the financial crisis, and saw others lost their jobs around me but I kept mine. I then went on a holiday to Fiji and picked up a tropical disease. My boss ‘let me go’ for it, but I knew that day was the best day of my life, despite having 30 days to leave Australia. Somehow going through a financial crisis, I became a full-time artist. I wasn’t brave enough to quit myself and he did me a favour. It did give me the fire to focus on my art, but also to be kind to others.

I come from a family of teachers and since becoming an artist have wanted to do things to show young minds that they can become artists or work in the creative fields. I do believe today there are a lot more opportunities for young artists, and even if I don’t like social media myself, I think it has helped with that.

In this garden installation at the Garden Museum, you can go through and see some of the kids’ drawings from a project I did with Shape North with schools in Kirklees which are blended into my own work. If I can inspire one child to believe they can be an artist I would be very happy. One of the greatest things that has come from my art has been the ability to work with children and young adults.

Denim Garden @ San Francisco Flower Market

And how did you discover your love for working with denim as your medium?

At first it was just an observation and was meant for a bit of fun on the side, I also thought denim was cool. I knew about jeans like an average person, knew the main brands but nothing more. In fact, it was a material you just wore and didn’t need to know a lot about and that was the beauty of it. But when I was cutting it, when pulling apart the stitching or looking at the laundry techniques, I thought of the people who made it. I thought about the history of it and why we wore jeans and it’s fascinating. Some of my early work was portraits of the people who wore denim that inspired millions around the world to wear it too. Like Marilyn, Brando, Dean and Debbie Harry. Later, I would get to do their official portraits.

I love the history of the material, along with the semiotics of it, even if year on year it has become more challenging. I loved the colour as indigo and think despite blue being a cold colour, I find deep indigo quite warm and love blending the shades.

The Secret Gardens I have made explore turning what started life as a plant back into plants, (via pants) so I often speak about this – especially to the younger generations. The first one I made was in New York at the Children’s Museum of the Arts, and I put a cotton plant at the entrance to it, to show the kids where cotton and denim came from – it was amazing how many parents didn’t know!

It’s the only material that ages with fades and gradients and evolved and that is what I love and use in my work, managing to blend all the shades together so it looks like a painting (and no, there is not paint, bleach or dyes on my work) and it is so versatile, and I enjoy layering it up. It’s full of duality what I want to explore more, from feelings of freedom, rebellion, democracy, Americana. The beauty comes with wear. A good pair of jeans should be the poster boy for sustainability.

I was going to ask the museum for a call out for old jeans, but I then thought… gardeners will use their old jeans in the yard.

Denim Garden @ San Francisco Flower Market

What does a typical day in the life of an artist look like for you?

It looks blue! Imagine me sat, like a child, cross legged in a sea of denim.

That said, there is not a typical day, and planning is hard. I also can go in waves of working non-stop for weeks and then hardly working at all for weeks (on the actual work in the studio) and must get more consistent hours of working. I’m a night owl and come alive after 6pm – I also used to work well in the mornings before 9am so I really guess that I am no good at the normal office hours. In East London I live and work in the same place, a converted pet food factory on the canal, but one floor is my studio and the other my living space, yet I still find barriers to going down to work in the day.

The work is time consuming, and as it’s so detailed it is really hard to estimate how long things will take. The fish for example in this installation at the Garden Museum certainly took longer than anticipated!

Ian Berry installing The Secret Garden at the Garden Museum

Can you tell us about your Secret Garden installation for the Garden Museum?

Emma House, the curator of the Garden Museum, got in touch perhaps two years or more ago after my friend Giovanni Aloi curated a show at the museum of Lucian Freud’s connection to flowers and had shown my work to her. I have shown the Secret Garden across the USA, in South America and in France, Spain, Sweden, Germany and was planning one in Istanbul but never showed it in my home country as a whole installation, so it was a perfect place and timing. With it being my hometown, it means more in some way, and I wanted to put a lot more into it and also show the range of what I can do, so I added the pond to it. And after installing many different gardens it’s important to keep changing and letting the garden grow.

Visitors will meander around seeing different things through a gazebo and the entrance to the steps, seeing numerous flowers and plants as well as finding the children’s work hidden within the vines. As the show goes through the summer holidays I really made with the kids in mind and knowing they would do workshops based around it. Many people seem to think the fish and the water in the pond is painted or lasered, but it’s all hand made from varying shades of denim and glued down. In someways, it’s quite basic, jeans, scissors, hands, glue.

It is all denim and only denim, whether from jeans or dresses, jackets or shorts. Some can be denim from a roll, for example the vines. This is usually seconded, damaged denim unable to be used by a brand. I often open my door to find neighbours have left them in a bag, but also denim brands and mills will send me their samples.

This installation has been made with the support of AGI Denim in Pakistan who helped me laser the denim using their own material and they have been a great help in not only this installation but many before. It’s important to use the industry tools to be more sustainable especially in using less water.

Do you have any favourite elements of the installation, or anything that was particularly challenging to make?

My favourite part of this new one made specifically for the Garden Museum has to be the pond, making a new central focus to the garden. It’s the first time I have put any of my hand made art on the floor, which when I think too much about it is crazy, but it helps visitors explore it and children to see something closer to their level. Just try and keep those sticky hands away, it seems everyone always wants to touch! I try and take the compliment that it shows interest.

The Secret Garden installation at the Garden Museum, photo by Graham Lacdao

What do you hope people take from visiting the Secret Garden?

I think first of all, to simply take it on face value, they don’t have to go so deep in to it if they are not like that. I want the aesthetic of this to be beautiful and enchanting so people can just disappear into the world of it and keep looking and discovering different things.

I remember when I started with denim nearly twenty years ago, I would say I was often recreating things we see every day yet hardly notice, and by using a material we see so often, put them together and make people look at something different.

I don’t want to dictate to people reading here what I want them to think. I think everyone can take something different away from it but if they could spare a thought for the natural world, our surroundings as well as thinking ‘where do my clothes end up? It could be a good prompt.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

I find it from many places and on a quick look it could seem like I do ‘a bit of everything’ but just in denim. From portraits, scenes, installations, but a common thread (sorry) is community as well as urban environments. I love cities and the layers of life within them. I notice the changes in them, and like denim itself the dualities. The garden and the way it happened has evolved into something a little dissimilar, but the earlier ones were very much urban gardens and the first was a community garden, imagining it being between two New York buildings in a narrow alley. The idea being to inspire kids and parents in the city to seek out these spaces as many wouldn’t have their own gardens.

I do let the material dictate a little and while it started out as a rural fabric, I see it as a very urban garment now and if you went to any high street, you would see many people wearing jeans. I think it is a material that is perfect for depicting contemporary life, both the good and the bad.

Do you have a favourite real-life garden to visit?

Oh good question, the first that sprung to mind as someone who loved history was Hampton Court Palace with the privy garden. I do love to visit Kew too. When I go to the Design Museum I always try and go through the gardens in Holland Park especially the Japanese inspired ones. However here in London there are many beautiful backyards, and some friends have amazing spaces, like my friend Jenny who has this amazing long garden at the back of her terrace house that is a magical place and I love when her apple trees as in full bloom.

The question asked for ‘real life’ and visiting but I do often think of the made-up gardens like the one in Alice in Wonderland and of course the Secret Garden so very childlike and magical.

Finally, as we are the Garden Museum, can you tell us about your relationship with plants, gardening and nature?

Well, let’s say I do a better job at keeping the denim plants alive. I have often very blue hands, but not green.

I grew up with parents that loved to do things in the garden and my mum with house plants that she spoke to, but I can’t pretend that I picked up so much. For the last twenty years I have lived in apartments and while my building has a beautiful roof terrace with lots of plants (looked after by the community) it was only really during Covid that I got in to the house plants – which ended up appearing in a body of work that I did on my ‘Covid Living Room’ some of the plants I recreated from that appearing in this show actually.

I’ve also lived the last twenty years in cities, from Sydney, London, Malmo and Amsterdam and do appreciate the green spaces they have – but when I go back to my village outside Huddersfield, I do love the quiet and open spaces and green, and am feeling like it is time to start moving to somewhere with that again.

Ian Berry: The Secret Garden is on display until 8 September, and was made possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England. 

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