Canadian-born artist Kerwayne Berry established her first studio in Newtown, Sydney, and has since relocated to southern Sydney to focus more fully on her artistic practice. Over time, she has become recognised for her subtle and evocative responses to the Australian landscape, working across painting, mixed media, and printmaking.
Berry’s practice is grounded in an enduring fascination with the natural world — its textures, light, and emotional resonance. Her works draw inspiration from the watery edges of rock pools, tidal flats, and the landlocked interiors of Australia, places where the elemental forces of water, earth, air, and fire converge. She explores how light reveals and transforms, observing its shifting presence through time and season — that “spectacular ability to illuminate all,” as she describes it. “It is how light falls or penetrates matter at different times of the day, different times of the year, that can transform the everyday into everyday magic.”
Through a refined use of colour, layered textures, and expressive gesture, Berry’s paintings invite viewers to reconnect with nature’s rhythms and to share in the quiet emotions of place. Her semi-abstract works are meditations on presence and perception, capturing fleeting sensations rather than literal views.
Critic Kate King writes of Berry’s practice:
“There is a rhythm playing through her work that is expressive of elemental forces — water, earth, air, and fire. These landscapes, found within rock pools and the water’s edge, echo aspects of Turner’s rawness… timeless and beyond cartography… a reflective surface into which viewers fall — that quiet place at the core of being, eliciting a sense of discovery, resisting interpretation, and indiscriminate in its beckoning.”
Berry’s distinctive visual language conveys both depth and energy through sophisticated layering and an acute sensitivity to material and atmosphere. Her latest exhibition, TLC — Texture | Light | Colour (November 2025), extends this exploration, translating the ineffable beauty of the Australian environment into luminous, meditative works that invite slow looking and enduring reflection.
