Berry
Sullivan

I'm a queer, neurodivergent artist working across ceramics, photography, hybrid digital practice, and walking. Rooted in Sydney, where the practice first took shape and was first shown — with long periods in Japan that have left a permanent mark on how I see and make. Study in Europe, fieldwork in East Africa and across Asia. Now based in Greece. The practice has always moved with me, and in some cases has been what moved me.

My ceramics work began in earnest under the guidance of Hayley A West and has stayed close to functional forms: vessels made to be used, glazes pushed toward unpredictability, the knowledge that the most interesting surface is the one you didn't fully plan. My photographic practice has grown alongside this — from Green, a sixteen-year accumulation of encounters with a single colour, to Still Warm, a cabinet of curiosities documenting found biological and material remains without removal, to The 8 Museum, which is where most of the thinking lives right now.

The 8 Museum is a photographic archive of found 8s — the numeral as it appears, spontaneously, across surfaces and environments worldwide. It is also a walking practice, a philosophical inquiry, and the subject of an ongoing MARes thesis framing the work as hachidō (八道): the way of eight, modelled on the Japanese dō traditions of embodied, devotional practice. The archive currently holds 6,200+ images; the target is 8,888.

The walking practice extends this — long-distance routes, urban drifts, the October 2025 pilgrimage along the Kumano Kodo in Japan. Walking as the engine that feeds the other practices: voice memos that become essays, field recollections, fragments of Afterberry.

I was an early beta tester for both MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, and worked ferociously from early 2022 — astonished by the speed at which ideas could become images, and genuinely captivated by the early chaos of it. As a long-standing admirer of absurdism and surrealism, I found something electric in those early models: the misregistrations, the uncanny anatomies, the outputs that arrived as if from somewhere beyond intention. Much of what was produced in that era has since been dismissed — accurately, in many cases — as AI slop. But for an extended moment, before the aesthetic collapsed into cliché, I was deeply engrossed. The 8 Museum began in January 2024, in part as a reply to that period — a counter-practice of human-scale attention in a world that was rapidly reorganising around automated perception. The loops will continue.

Affiliation

• Ionian University

Research

Practice

• Ceramics & Photography
• Hybrid Arts — The 8 Museum, Still Warm
• Walking Practice
• Writing