A Text and Paper Collage Portfolio by Emma Lehto
Emma Lehto is an artist who works with text and paper collage, often manipulating books, magazines, and other printed media to create artworks that utilize the materiality of the medium to express new meanings.
In our previous feature of Emma’s work with novel meanings, we looked at the artist’s method of cutting into existing multi-page volumes to create layered, colourful contour images or portions of images. In some cases these layers become figures in their own right, while in other cases the artist’s cuts obscure part of a larger image or serve as a kind of censorship, like in her works with pornographic texts.
Outside of the cutting works emma also produces pieces of typography -- it’s interesting to view these practices in contrast to one another. In the cut pieces, typography is somewhat incidental to the figurative artworks, while in the others, the focus is on the fonts, letterforms, and the meanings of the words themselves.
