LECTURER IN SCULPTURE

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26031, 7 February 1950, Page 8

LECTURER IN SCULPTURE

CANTERBURY COLLEGE APPOINTMENT MR E. J. DOUDNEY ARRIVES “As a city, Christchurch is very attractive. When you consider that it is only 100 years old, it seems that a miracle has been produced in that time. One would think it to be of a much more mellow age than that” said Mr E. J. Doudney, formerly of London, in an interview yesterday. Mr Doudney has arrived to take the position of senior lecturer in sculpture at Canterbury University College, and will take up his duties on February 27. Mr Doudney is accompanied by his wife and two sons, aged six and eight and his first task, he said, would be to look for a house. Mr Doudney is a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and until he left for New Zealand was a member of the council; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the Society of Industrial Artists. During the war he was in charge of electrical installation on Hawker aircraft, including the Hurricane. Typhoon, and Tempest fighters. For the last few years he has been chief designer to Halex, Ltd., a big British plastic manufacturing company. “I have been doing quite a bit of industrial designing, including types of toilet articles, such as combs and toothbrushes. Plastics is a growing industry in Britain,” said Mr Doudney. “Halex. Ltd., was the earliest plastic manufacturing firm in Britain, having started with celluloid manufacture in 1870. There are now hundreds of other plastic materials. “I am now really going back to my old job of sculpture,” Mr Doudney said. “The finest training in industrial design is sculpture, which gives an appreciation of form, and engineering. which gives the means of putting it into workable form.” Before the war, Mr Doudney did sculptural work, mainly in carvings, on and in buildings in Durham. Darby. Mansfield. Teddington, Hampton and Sunbury. He was educated at the Royal Academy Schools, and the City and Guild of the London Institute, and has travelled extensively in Europe, both on scholarships, and while working with Halex, Ltd. “I have had very little contact with art in New Zealand, but I saw an exhibition of New Zealand artists’ work at New Zealand House in London two or three months ago. The work was better than I had anticipated, although it was not really representative, and was mainly from young artists,” he said.