A few months ago, Neville Ferry, one of Malta's leading ceramists, who has been living away from the islands for these last 16 years, returned to retire in Malta. An outstanding artist, he started his artistic career, like other Maltese contemporary artists, studying at the government's School of Art and then in 1971 he proceeded abroad to further his art studies in England at the Croydon College of Art. In 1972 he read BA (Hons) in Art and Design, specialising in ceramics at the Loughborough College of Art and Design. Mr Ferry's main creative activity is in fact in the field of ceramics.
Before he left Malta to go and settle in Britain in 1986, his name was synonymous with ceramic art just like Gabriel Caruana. His great love for Stone Age art stimulated him to research about Malta's prehistoric temples and most of his work is inspired by them.
Mr Ferry's first personal art exhibition was held at Gallery 359, in Nottingham, England, in 1975 after he finished his degree course at the Loughborough College of Art. The work consisted mostly of coursework. Then, a year after, the artist showed most of the work done at college in another exhibition with the theme Icons of Worship which was held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta. The design and foreword for the brochure were done by Prof. Richard England.
Mr Ferry's work is highly symbolical, generated by the enigmatic forms that are found in Neolithic art. He feels that in these Neolithic sources exists a powerful energy that is transmitted to the viewers. These forces fascinate Mr Ferry. In his autobiography he wrote: "I have always been interested and fascinated by that which is mysterious and incomprehensible and driven (perhaps) by outside (or from within) forces/powers." At first, only the stones and megaliths interested the artist. He wanted to create "environments" that produced a feeling of something, which was present, but unseen: A kind of an aura, which attracted the viewers. For Mr Ferry, certain natural objects and images around him stimulate his imagination so greatly that he feels that they project a kind of mystic power, and which we are not capable to perceive.
Man always tried to understand the forces behind things through rituals (churches, Megalithic temples, holy statues and religious artefacts...) and other human activities. We find and feel this kind of energy, mainly in things which are sacred. Mr Ferry believes that this energy which is especially felt in our ancient megalithic temples still exists. The artist is absorbed immensely by the sacred and mythical aspect of the Neolithic. He is fascinated by the mysterious energy of the temples.
It is interesting to note that Mr Ferry is still obsessed with his childhood and youthful past and still finds it hard to forget that time. The artist remembers his early days when he was a young boy involved in Church activities as an altar boy. He is still puzzled by certain ambiguous religious activities and still finds it difficult to understand and explain what was going on. He stated: "As an altar boy I spent a lot of time in the church and my recollections are those of huge dark buildings, dark and mysterious, frightening in a way. Places full of rituals and haunting music in Latin which added to the aura of the place. Nothing was ever very clear for a young person. But the answers were there if you asked the right questions."
These recollections of his early childhood influenced him and had great importance in particular on certain inspirations of his works. This is mainly seen in the religious themes he worked on during the early days after his art studies in the UK, and his arrival back in Malta. What fascinates me is that Mr Ferry manages to coalesce the spiritual element of both the Megalithic and Catholic qualities. The repeated use of shapes of altars, shrines, temple bells, niches, tombstones and offerings of temple pieces suggest great allurement to the "sacred".
In his work Temple Bells the artist used massive smooth shapes with the volume and strength of bells; they ring when struck, as they were produced in a high temperature kiln. On the top parts of the bells a quasi megaron motif was formed and at the bottom of their shapes regular patterns were applied. The glazes produced in these pieces give a transparent quality well amenable to the grain of the clay. These ceramic sculptures express symbolic allusions, at times depicting the archetypal female goddess, better known as the "Fat Lady" with a bulbous body. Mr Ferry's goddesses are solitary, standing alone, mostly on a pedestal or niche, realised with a divine presence. They resemble the statues of saints fervently venerated with great pomp in Catholic churches. The Mother or Earth Goddess as depicted by the artist has the spiritual core of the feminine archetype. She represents abundance, life and growth rather than showing the qualities of the frightful goddess representing fate and death. The way the artist presents these primordial images of the goddess in his stoneware establishes a new perspective to understand the unifying factor between humans and nature.
Mr Ferry's use of the imagery of Neolithic forms is also related to sexual symbolism. Most of the ceramic works, which were exhibited with the title A World Within a World at the Cathedral Museum in Mdina, Malta in 1998, had a sexual connotation. Some local art critics maintain that this work expresses the sacred aspect of ancient fertility rites. His phallic symbols evoked great interest with the public. It is a reverential message towards life.
Over the last 30 years, Mr Ferry created a body of work which incarnates a deeply religious and archetypal vision of the Neolithic past. His stoneware ceramics are massive evoking a primitive nature of primordial rock. The artist works the clay directly by hand, using his thumb and fingers; he uses all his body, but hardly any tools. He becomes part of the work. This is an essential characteristic of primitive art. Coloured oxides are rubbed into the textured surface of his earthen sculptures. The effects of his metallic matt glazes are unusual and leave a remarkable aesthetic impression. Mr Ferry's work is marked by great intellectual energy and his love and continuous search for the primordial rudiments confirm his creative abilities and originality. His artistic expression remains concerned with the spiritual world, the mythic and the mystic with a highly developed language of symbols that are both personal and yet universal to the human condition.
Mr Ferry is concerned with the sacred and he tries to show this in his artwork. Shamanic rituals heal and bring back order in life. The shaman's role is to locate or invoke the sacred. The sacred constitutes an ordering of the world. The shaman ensures safety, keeping the forces of chaos away. We know that shamanic functions are related to weather prediction, rain making, finding game, which have to do with the survival of the community, and of keeping famine, starvation, and death at bay. Healing is a special function within the self. The idea of the "modern" artist-shaman takes us back to the time of the surrealists and recurs again in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today one can understand that the artist is still acting like a shaman. The artist becomes the bridge between the "sacred" and the "secular", what belongs to the "spiritual" and that of "matter". Mr Ferry's ceramic shapes have become, in the process of creativity, relics or echoes of the subconscious. At times his work consists of bell shaped shrines with heavy matt, metallic coloured oxidised glazing and sometimes ceremonial pieces, unearthed vessels that could have functional purposes in religious rituals.
Another earlier aspect of Neville Ferry's artwork is the "found object". This is not the first time that the artists made use of waste materials, assemblages of all sorts of mediums. In his autobiography he recalls: "I would drive around the countryside looking for rubbish tips and collecting anything that interested me at the time. Almost all objects showed evidence of the passage of time... floor tiles, architectural details, wood with paint, peeling, rusty metal etc." With these "found objects" Mr Ferry created many installations and he also incorporated the "found objects" with pieces of ceramics. For him this was a new idea of fusing together ceramics and "found objects". He showed these pieces of artworks in their appropriate environments. There is no doubt that great modern masters had an influence on Mr Ferry's work. He has a great admiration for the French artist, Marcel Duchamp, the leader in the field of "readymade art". Such artists claimed that they were "more interested in the ideas than in the final product". Behind this artistic phenomena of presenting to the public "readymade art" or "found objects", lies a psychological question. The "found objects" have symbolic gestures, that express two opposites: "Great abstraction" and "great realism". From a psychological point of view these two gestures signify the object-matter and the non-object - the spirit, the conscious and the unconscious. The artist is capable of discovering "personality" in discarded objects, which are then turned into works of art. It is a type of "animism", which suggests that material objects have the potential to carry life.
Mr Ferry had more than 10 personal art exhibitions and participated in many important collective exhibitions in Malta and abroad.
I see that Mr Ferry's ceramics, sculptures and drawings are symbols which express the collective ancient energy; they are forces driven from within "sacred stones", Megalithic artefacts and primordial images. These forces are transformed into archetypal images that emerge from the artist's psyche. The artist strives hard to make the invisible visible. These visible images in ceramics, most of them referring to sacred objects or objects of ritual, are a mirror of the artist's soul.