Degree Show 2024: Meet the Graduates - Lacey Ferri

Introduce yourself and your work. What ideas and themes are important to you?

Lacey Ferri is from rural upstate New York and there she studied a bachelor's in drawing, woodworking, and ceramics. Her love of architecture and traditional building methods led her to work on building restoration projects across Europe.

"It's hard to verbalize what themes are important to me, since mostly all I think about is how things look. I think about the relationships between voids and masses, whether or not a line is a good and true line, what times are good times for contrast, or subtle tones. The satisfaction of marrying form with function. I rarely think about colour."

What materials do you use? Why have you chosen to work with these materials?

"I love precision. I love measuring things and getting them as perfect as I possibly can. There's so much joy in using a beautiful tool for its exact intended purpose... That moment when everything is going so swimmingly that you imagine the tool and your hands are singing the work into being - that's why I'm a craftsperson, and that's probably why wood is my favourite material. I can control it, it doesn't move around, like paint and water do. It's warm, homey, and familiar, yet with all its different species, it contains a thousand personalities."

What drew you to the School, and what do you want to remember about these last two years?

"I was drawn to the respect and love for tradition. I wanted to be a part of older art and craft traditions, and the School has enabled me to begin that. Besides falling in love with marquetry, studying geometry has been a huge help - it's the start of so many things. It's the frame for all pattern, and once you have the right tools and know the way it works, you can look at a design in a church or on an old chest and go back home and whip it up on paper in no time."

Describe your studio to us – what would we find?

"A lot of tiny offcuts of hardwood veneer, scattered all over my desk and chair. You'd see my veneer files, separated into colour types. I think of wood colours like food, so besides the actual species name the labels say stuff like "chocolates", "biscuits", and "red foods" (oily soups, chestnuts, bresaola, peanut skins). Also knives, chisels, fretsaw, marquetry stand, bone glue. Piles of wood. I'm a bit of a scavenger, any time I see a piece of good wood on the street, or a piece of furniture I can tear apart and use for something else, I grab it."

Professionally, what are your hopes and goals?

"I usually say 'As long as I can work with my hands I'm content', but it would be wonderful to work with someone specifically in marquetry for a while. I feel like I still need much more training because this area of woodworking and surface ornamentation is relatively new to me. I have a great foundation in woodshop machinery but I'd like to take it to the next level with finer, more detailed work with handtools. I'd like to make or collaborate on traditional styles of furniture making or interior architectural fittings."