IYeadon’
s work is fantastic...a marvelous acquisition that has prominent place
in the Museum for the enjoyment of the general public
Sigurour Hjartarson, Director of the Icelandic
Institute of Phallology and the Icelandic Phallological Museum (2003).
For much of Yeadon’s career his work has been pornographic, humorous, oppositional, disquieting, difficult, obsessive, unfashionable and mostly goes against the grain. His work confronts the paradoxes and taboos of social and sexual politics that face us today. His motto is that of Jonathan Swift, "to vex the world rather than divert it".
The Morning Star described Yeadon's work as subversive; he is Ia guerrilla of the imagination.
Sandy Moffat of Glasgow School of Art said that IYeadon was one of those artists responsible for the reintroduction of figurative imagery, an imagery capable of representing the ideas of our time.
John Yeadon was born in 1948 in the North of England - sharing a birth date with the character Gargantua from his favourite novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais.
He studied at Hornsey College of Art, London, in the late 60’s, gaining his M.A. at the Royal College of Art in 1972. After 30 years lecturing at Coventry University, latterly as M.A. Course Tutor in Fine Art, he retired from teaching in 2002 in order to concentrate full-time on his art.
The occupation at Hornsey College of Art in 1968 and the Artery collective (the Artery cultural journal was first established at the RCA in 1971) informed Yeadon's attitudes to education, open access and experimentation, and his interventionist practice of resistance. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain while attending the RCA in 1971.
He has been a visiting lecturer on postgraduate programmes throughout Britain, notably, the Slade, Goldsmiths, Chelsea, Wimbledon School of Art, Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in 2007. Having had one-person exhibitions at the Ikon Gallery/Birmingham, Royal Festival Hall/London, Centre for Contemporary Art/Glasgow, Transmission Gallery/Glasgow, Phoenix Gallery/Brighton, Vilma Gold Gallery/London and Wagdas Gallery/London, a major international show was held in Porto, Portugal, in 2002.
Yeadon has also has exhibited in numerous group shows, including the British Art Show, Critical Realism/Nottingham Castle, Invisible Man/Goldsmiths Gallery and Post-Morality/ Kettles Yard,Cambridge, and recently has collaborated with exhibitions at 39/London. His work is celebrated by Emmanuel Cooper in his book the Sexual Perspective / Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and has been reviewed in Art Monthly, the Guardian, the Independent, the Morning Star, Tribune, Gay Times and Gay Scotland.
His work is in the collections, particularly, of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Royal College of Art, Coventry City Council, Coventry University, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Icelandic Phallological Museum, Rejkyavik.
Since 1999 Yeadon's work has been predominantly digital. Although he has used photographic sources since the 1960’s the digitally assisted works are among the first he has produced using photographic images in their own right. But Yeadon still regards himself as a painter/printmaker and currently he is using digitally processed photomontages to provide source imagery for a return to drawing and painting.
