Carry akroyd biography
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Carry Akroyd is a printmaker and lives on the edge of the Fens and her work is dominated by its unique landscape and features. She has been commissioned to design book covers amongst which in relation to the works of John Clare.
Her printed works are created using screen print, lino cut and wood engravings. Her natural ability to pick up the process and create marks using the lithographic medium are very evident in her first piece - Undrained Field.
Carry's work has been shown in many publications to include 'The Wood is Sweet' bygd John Clare, 'The Sea', published by Greenpeace and 'Barnwell' bygd Paddy Kitchen published by Hamish Hamilton.
Selected Exhibitions
Originals Print Show, Mall Galleries, London
Letchworth Museum Gallery
Wimpole Hall, Cambridge (National Trust)
The Anderson Gallery, Broadway
Ely Old Fire Engine House
Leicester City Gallery
Alfred East Gallery, Kettering.
Collections
Gibbon Marler, Edit
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The Society of Wildlife Artists
Carry Akroyd lives on the Northamptonshire Cambridgeshire border between the Nene Valley and the Fens. Working as both a painter and printmaker, her focus is mainly on arable landscapes, with wildlife living on the margins of agriculture. Elected to SWLA in 2000, she won the Terravesta prize in 2017.
An appreciation of the unspectacular has given Carry a sympathetic connection to the nineteenth century poet John Clare; she has illustrated three books of John Clare’s poems (“The Shepherd’s Calendar”,“This Happy Spirit” and“The Wood is Sweet”). In her own books (‘natures powers & spells, Landscape Change, John Clare and Me’, and “Found in the Fields”), many images echo Clare’s poetry in observing of how man affects nature, two hundred years ago and now. After 25 years of making images relating to the poetry of John Clare, in 2016 Carry was invited to be President of the John Clare Society.
Carry’s illu
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CARRY AKROYD S.W.L.A.
Born in 1953, Carry obtained an MA in Fine Art from Northampton University. She became a member of the Wildlife Society of Artists in 2000 and from 2003 to 2006 was a Council member. Carry is a painter and printmaker and occasionally gives workshops and demonstrations on printmaking and screen printing. For Carry, screenprinting is directly about colour combining monoprinting methods with handmade stencils. There is always a dynamic between planned intentions and spontaneous reactivity to the emerging image - the interface between the deliberate, the impulsive and the accidental. Carry feels that the landscape is inextricably linked to the plants and animals that live in it. She wants her images to project a sense of a place without being too accurate - somewhere between a map and a memory - and her starting point is direct drawing in the landscape. Living in rural Northamptonshire, the arable landscape has been the main source of her imagery, punctuated by fo