After much hard graft and effort my show is up at Medcalf Bar in conjunction with this year’s London Design Festival.
If you’d like to see the work for yourself, then take a trip to London’s Exmouth Market (40 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QE), have a drink and have a nose at my work plus the work of Squint/Opera and Image Surgery too.
Here’s the official press release (plus some images)…
• Ella Johnston: Processed birds
In response to Design Festival, artist Ella Johnston has chosen to celebrate the fundamentals of print design by deconstructing her multi-colour drawings of birds down to the essential colour elements of print production – CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black).
Ella’s ‘colour separations’ are screen printed individually and then constructed into a cubes with each side an individual colour constituent. These simple shapes unify the separate elements to address the inter-relationship of the constituent colours and to reference that they are in effect one image.
In display the cubes will be suspended by wire in clusters to create a community of the different breeds of birds and to also emphasise the contrasting process colours and shapes when placed with each other. The intention of the installation is to add a playful element to the exhibition, a more fun and celebratory investigation of design.
Furthermore Ella has also chosen to print a series of limited edition black and white images of the, ‘processed birds’ visualising a further aspect of the process of four-colour screen print preparation. In the print process, each image is divided into its composite CMYK colours, the ‘plates’. These plates are rendered in black and white before the respective colour is added for print. For Ella, during this preparation, observing what was once a highly complex and colourful set of images broken down in to black and white gives the work a new meaning – they become solid and complete pieces in their own right.
This new body of work is a playful investigation into the construction of an image through the print process, an engaging exploration of the processes that are required. It continues with Ella’s longstanding themes and her use of ‘simple’ form to reflect a range of aesthetic and cultural concerns.
CMYK flying birds
Limited edition black and white print
Blurry boxes
Design Festival
Medcalf Exhibitions
