These are examples of my work in the built environment where images interact with space and place.
London’s Transport Museum
Paper cuts used as stencils for sand blasted glass.
This is a 25 foot glass wall depicting children’s transport commissioned for screening off the children’s study area in the museum. Each panel depicts a form of transport used by children: skate board, go cart, roller blades, tricycle, pedal car, walking.
Mount Stewart School Library
Emulsion paint and papercuts
A complete re-decoration of the library was commissioned to increase children’s desire to read books and use the library. The mural was painted with trade emulsions and the friezes were paper cuts in coloured paper glued straight onto the wall.
St Leonards Edgelands
Linocut
‘St Leonards Edgelands’ was a print installation, part of Point of Decay, made for the launch event of Coastal Currents Arts Festival in Bottle Alley, St Leonards on Sea. Bottle Alley runs along the southernmost edge of St Leonards and has decayed physically and socially since it was built in the 1930s. The images of caryatids and incident tape tie the coastal edge of the town to its northern edgeland, Hollington Valley nature reserve, which was until the year before a home to animal, plant and human populations. Now it has been felled to make way for a road, two roundabouts and industrial estates. Edgelands are full of riches of one sort and another. Biodiversity or ‘development’ potential depnding upon your perspective. The prints on the southern edgeland decayed, peeled, and have now been removed.
These four poems are from a group ‘Saying it with Flowers’ that makes imaginative connections between lives of plants and human actions.
The poems, in settings of fear and danger, inspired the composer David Loxley-Blounts’s compostion DuoSet, four pieces for organ and solo instruments. The first performances took place at St Lawrence Jewry, Guildhall Yard, in the City of London, as part of a series of free lunchtime concerts on four Tuesdays in October 2016. They are illustrated with linocuts by Emily Johns.
Victor Hugo’s wonderful long poem The Big Story of the Lion was written for his grandchildren. It has been newly translated by Timothy Adès and illustrated by Emily Johns. This thick concertina book published by Hearing Eye is available from Central Books for £5.
Cookie to Witch is an Old Story
A poem by Leah Fritz
Five woodcuts by Emily Johns Letterpress printed by Peter Loyd at Holbeche Press. Published by Hearing Eye 20pp £9 ISBN 1 870841 97 2
Two children’s tales, ‘The Gingerbread Boy’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’, combine to create the central metaphor of the narrative poem, which follows the life of a runaway girl, from naivety through maturity and beyond. From Cookie to Witch is an Old Story was written at a time in my life when adolescent daughters were more and more away from home, travelling and/or at university. In psycho-babble, this is called ‘the empty nest syndrome’. It is, in any case, a time of transformation, the dying embers of useful parenthood from which a renewed sense of human purpose may, phoenix-like, arise.
At Cross Purposes
By Raymond Geuss
Illustrated with two papercuts by Emily Johns
Letterpress printed by Peter Lloyd at The Holbeche Press Published by Hearing Eye 18pp £6.00 ISBN 1870841794 Buy from Central Books
There were limits to the hospitality even of a Parisian monastery in the tenth century, a a wandering clerk from somewhere east of the Rhine discovers to his cost. The original bi-lingual text (in Old High German and Latin) which records the story of this unusual and amusing encounter is presented and translated here by Raymond Geuss.
Raymond Geuss, Professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and author of the seminal The Idea of a Critical Theory and Morality, Culture & History is also a poet.
Their Mountain Mother
by Edmund Prestwich 36 pages ISBN 978-1-905082-46-9 Published by Hearing Eye
This single long poem with four plates by printmaker Emily Johns deals with Lesotho, 1820-1824. Invaded by starving hordes from across the mountains, the Southern Sotho chiefdoms collapse in massacre and starvation. The tiny Mokoteli clan lies directly in the path of the invaders. The Mokoteli chief Moshoeshoe is both brave and wise. But will he be able to lead his people to safety?
“Edmund Prestwich’s small epic of indigenous Africa shows how a single figure can be the focus of a whole race. It is powerful story telling, adroit and incantatory. Laid throughout with rich, moving detail, it achieves great pathos and mythical force.” Ian Pople
“Emily Johns’ powerful linocuts continue the notable tradition of political illustration epitomized by the likes of Clifford Harper and Kathe Kollwitz.” Gareth Evans, Time Out
“This is beautiful writing, and it is a grand story with arresting illustrations from Emily Johns. At no point did I doubt the imaginative reality, the absolute commitment of Prestwich to reliving this tale. I was there with him.” Helena Nelson, Ambit
