Typographic Exploration: Emma Lehto
Emma Lehto uses her artwork as a typographic exploration into books, everyday objects, and seemingly innocuous materials. Emma’s work has a particular kind of softness to it that comes out in her use of fabrics, floral patterns and delicate sewing techniques. I enjoy how she offsets this quality with overt subject matter and images, such as in her profanity laced pillowcases, and delicate sewn-text works.
Emma goes beyond the idea of book art as merely the production of books, and instead uses books as a kind of conceptual material. For example, in her Creative Abuse series, she takes several well-known novels and shoots them with guns, photographing and displaying the aftermath.
Irresistible Forces, mixed media
In her sewn text works Emma obscures the language itself so that we are forced to look at the physicality of the object she has created. Her typography works look at letters and type as objects in and of themselves. Visit Emma’s web portfolio to see more exploration of the physical forms of language.
