Carry Akroyd is a painter-printmaker whose images examine the relationship between humans, landscape and wildlife. Her representations of contemporary agriculture, botany and birds concentrate on colour, shape and balance.
Her most favoured printmaking technique is serigraphy, (screenprinting), but employing a very low-tech approach. A lot of time is spent with scissors or scalpel, creating cut-paper stencils to control where each layer of ink passes through the screen. Where the layers of ink overlap they create new colours, and the image is invented during the process of being made, reacting to how the image develops.
In painting her work is often watercolour or acrylic on paper, but although her subject matter is constant, her attitude to each medium is restless.
Carry is a member of the Society of Wildlife Artists and shows with them in London each year. In 2017 she was awarded the top prize, (the Terravesta Award), at The Natural Eye exhibition at the Mall Galleries.
The range of Carry’s work is reproduced in her own books: Natures Powers & Spells, Landscape Change, John Clare and Me, and Found in the Fields. Many images echo John Clare’s poetry in observing of how man affects nature, two hundred years ago and now. A series of prints comprise a touring show that is an introduction to the poet. After 25 years of making and exhibiting images relating to the poetry of John Clare, in 2016 Carry was invited to be President of the John Clare Society.
Carry’s work has been used on several book jackets, and she is the series cover artist for Bloomsbury’s British Wildlife Collection and for Saraband’s Encounters with Nature. She illustrates the Bird of the Month column in The Oldie magazine, a compilation of which are published by Bloomsbury under the title A Sparrow’s Life’s as Sweet as Ours. In August 2024 this has been reprised in a new book, Swoop Sing Perch Paddle with author John McEwen.
Carry lives in rural Northamptonshire, a few miles from where she grew up.
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