A Leap Forward at Toad Hall: David Ferry’s Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour

Abstract

The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame, is the fictional frame for this discussion on David Ferry’s altered book and print series Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour (2017- 2018). Grahame’s character, Toad, is obsessed with the motor car. Toad’s disturbance of the rural scene is married with Ferry’s practice of inserting photographic additions – mischievous intrusions – from hobbyist ‘donor’ books in to discarded pictorial guidebooks of the British Isles. Ferry’s photomontages and prints from the late 1980s on, which comment on the British heritage industry, are the wider context for this essay.

For Seasonal Veteran and Vintage Cars in Colour, Ferry overlaid the ‘host’ picture book of museum vehicles from the collection of a wealthy aristocrat, with bright, exuberant flora from gardening books, thus obscuring the ‘intruders’ by greening over their presence. The paper proposes that these photomontages are a response to the inevitable redundancy of technology, and concludes that modern innovations are eventually co-opted by traditional conservative values. This argument is constructed using three protagonists: Futurist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as advocate of modernity; John, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, as motoring pioneer; and Kenneth Grahame as establishment figure.