PUBLIC ART
James Johnson-Perkins
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PUBLIC ART
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PUBLIC ART
James Johnson-Perkins is an artist working across large-scale public art, digital montage, sculpture and immersive installation. His practice explores history, place, archives and collective memory through ambitious, site-responsive works. Major Public Arts commissions include a Megablock Totem Pole at Cecil Sharp House, an Art-War Billboard, an Angel of the North celebratory robotic sculpture commissioned by Batlic Gallery for Contemporary Art and a 400 square meter illuminated lightbox for Jaipur Arts Week. His work has been internationally recognised through awards including the Alpine Fellowship Prize, Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize and Bath Open Prize.
His approach combines image-making with research into local history and cultural traditions, ensuring each project is grounded in its specific context. Alongside visual production, he often maintains a reflexive practice, documenting his practice through creative writing and film-making that combine process, observation, and critical introspection.
PUBLIC WORKS and COMMISSIONS
Johnson-Perkins is continuously seeking public art commissions and collaborations with institutions, festivals and civic bodies that engage archives, local histories and specific sites through large-scale, immersive and publicly accessible works.
Jaipur Galore, Jaipur, india, 20m x 2m Lightbox, Jan 2026
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Masters of War, Billboard, Waygood Studios, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, 2007
Maegaple, Cecil Sharp House, London, UK, 10m Megablok Totem-pole, 2009
Public Art Proposals (Concept Sketches)
Tangramatic, Concept Sketch
Batmenice, Concept Sketch, Venice, Italy
Jengamanic, For a City Plinth, Concept Sketch, UK
Public Art Proposals
Jengamatic
JENGAMANIC is a monumental sculptural Plinth work inspired by the precarious logic of the children’s game Jenga. Constructed from oversized wooden blocks, the piece explores balance, instability, resilience, and collective interdependence; blending playfulness with psychological tension. TANGRAMATIC is a set of architectural panels inspired by Chinese Tangram puzzles. Using bright geometric shapes, the panels explore unity in diversity, showing how individual parts come together to form a whole. Influenced by stained glass, this building interventionist work reflects connection, shared experience, and hopeful coexistence. BATMANICE is a monumental panoramic imagined intervention that transforms the architecture of Venice into a hyper saturated comic theatre of collapse, spectacle, and urban mythology. Stretching across the facades of Piazza San Marco, the work fuses Pop Art aesthetics, digital montage, and superhero iconography to explore themes of power, fragility, absurdity, and collective anxiety. Through oversized BATMAN explosions "SPLATT!", "POW!!", "ZOWIE!" the piece converts the historic cityscape into a psychologically charged battleground where humour, catastrophe, and cultural memory collide; balancing nostalgia, visual excess, and tension within a playful yet unsettling public spectacle. STANDBY is an imagined installation created during a residency with the Belgrade Arts Centre. It explores absence, suspension, and restriction through a vacated exhibition space of locked boxes, sealed entrances, and prohibitive signage. Responding to lockdown and cancel culture, it stages a paused condition where meaning is withheld and deferred. ELERGY recreates the powerful gesture of mothers who placed 109 prams in public space to represent children killed during the war. This proposed recreation aims to reflect on this grief, loss, and the visibility of civilian suffering. While rooted in Ukraine, this imagined installation resonates across multiple global conflicts, echoing the ongoing tragedy of displaced and forgotten young lives, on both saides of every war.
Tangramatic
Batmanice
Standby
Elergy