Emily John
About
I work primarily with woodcut relief – reapplying contemporary CNC technologies to the matrix carving process as a way to infuse industrial narratives and class heritage back into the process of creation; maximising print’s inherent ‘big, bold, fast, loud, quick, cheap’ ethos.
I create prints centred around class, culture, and identity. My artwork is informed by the academic critique of culture as a socio-political product and I take inspiration from mid-century graphic design; an era in which physical print principles and processes occupied a fundamental space within advertisement and the dissemination of information, but also a time of great social shifts.
Print has always been a vehicle of the working class, especially within Britain – think the chartists or the suffragettes. It is a discipline charged with anger, pain, politics and protest; it is a voice for the voiceless and its context as such is fundamental to my practice and my technical decisions.
I am trying to express my own position within a society that cultivates toxically optimistic messages but operates on a basis of class exploitation; in turn propagating social sickness. I want to acknowledge the value of people on the flip side of its polarity because they are so often made to feel inconsequential by mass culture. I create socially reflexive statements that subvert contemporary cultural ideals and highlight the toxicity of commodified hope and of sponsored optimism as underwritten by consumerism.
I have always had a sense of being a social vagabond and that experience is an incredibly powerful form of bonding in a culture that has become so insular because of technology. I am using these same technologies to critique and visually reflect on that feeling of hopelessness. I live within a system that sees me as a consumable. I can’t free myself, but I can make myself seen, and I can force other people to recognise me. Ignorance is bliss, but bliss cannot be allowed to exist at the detriment of other people’s freedom. My practice is processing pain, unpicking trauma and finding understanding.
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