Impact7

Professor David Ferry

Country

GBR

Affliliation

ARE. ( Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers),Cardiff School of Art and Design, University of Wales Institute, United Kingdom

Biography

David Ferry was born in the Northern British seaside town of Blackpool at a time when most holiday makers in Britain did not venture overseas! Cheap airline travel and European package holidays were in an infancy. The humorous anecdotes, and the satirical overlays of British culture found in towns like Blackpool remain a constant source of inspiration for him. In later times Ferry's fascination for travel lead to a continued relationship with North America, where for a period he lived and worked in New York.
He is currently the Professor of Printmaking and Book Arts at the Cardiff School of Art in Wales.
Ferry's book arts and prints can be found in some of the leading museums of the world inc, The Ashmolean Oxford, Arts Institute of Chicago, KUMU the National Museum of Estonia, National Museum of Australia, National Museum of Wales, The Museum of Modern Art New York and the Victoria & Albert museum London. He was awarded a Pollok-Krasner award in 2002 and won the Bronze Medal of the First International Book Arts Competition in Seoul in 2005. His most recent solo  exhibition was at the Simon Finch/ Woodfinch gallery in Mayfair  London in 2010.

Paper

Up Against the 'Thing': Comic Espionage and Double Acts on the British Stage and Page

Abstract

The British satirical graphic tradition is a rich and glorious one. This essay will search out some significant motives and subject them to a broad sweep of social histories from the Nineteenth Century to the present day. Much attention focuses on the life and times of the British playwright Joe Orton (1933-1967). Orton lived amidst an extraordinary time in British social history and much groundbreaking graphic and performed comedy resulted through the reshaping of the popularly known phenomena known as the 'Permissive Society'. Hailed in the popular press as the 'Oscar Wilde of the Welfare State', Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell raised the stakes of graphic satire with a series of well-rehearsed and subversive interactive strikes on the book stock held at the Islington public library in London. Their 'defiled' library books, as they could be termed, are not only a testimony to an age of artistic and sexual liberation, but also paved the way for a greater appreciation of the Artists Book and art that is altered and collaborated, and not necessarily solely created!

Date

Wednesday 28 September

Session

11:00am - 12.30pm

Speaking

11:10am

Email

Dferry@uwic.ac.uk

Website