John Manton

In my work as an artist, I am interested in how we make sense of the records of our past, how we build, share, and contest histories, how we understand the hold that storytelling has on us, and how we shake it loose, even if only for a moment. To help shake the hold of narrative, and maybe look at its components with a fresh eye, I make art across a variety of media, including video and sound work, painting and drawing, sculpture, and photography. My works layer and braid audio and visual archival material, together with the marks made over years of drawing, the offcuts of an academic career as a historian and anthropologist, and photos from homes I’ve lived in and from fieldwork in the history of global health.

My documentary on Ikoli Harcourt Whyte, Nigerian composer and leprosy activist, is available here

My public video library is available here