Jo Berry, 'The Machine'

Jo Berry’s paintings are in dialogue with the status of the image today, a look at the world viewed through screens.

She often draws from overlooked corners of internet for inspiration, in the case of this work, a YouTube video of a smoke machine demonstration, photographed from a laptop screen. An image to reference her painting process. Qualities such as underexposure, blurring and misregistered colour are under investigation as the already corrupted image becomes further removed from its original source through the process of duplication. More limitations are placed on the image by painting on a small scale with an airbrush and selecting a scene in semi-darkness. The viewer is left to reconstruct a narrative themselves.

Jo Berry is a painter based in Cardiff. In 2022 she was longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize. Her paintings have been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize, the Beep Painting Biennial and the National Eisteddfod for Wales. In 2018 she exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London as part of ‘Into a Light’ curated by Lle Gallery, Cardiff and Paper Gallery, Manchester.

Jo Berry was selected by the judges of the 2025 Irving Open Call as the winner of the Open, and she will be exhibiting her paintings at Irving Gallery in a solo show in the summer of 2026.