Little Lessons in Safety
Emily Holton
May 2007
ISBN 1-894994-22-1  
978-1-894994-22-4
Graphic Novel / Visual Arts
7x6 inches, 160 pages
$17 CDN / US

This is a collection of Holton's bookworks and drawings, produced over the past five years. Her "scratchy intelligent line drawings" (Broken Pencil) and lean text play with the format of children's readers, comics, celebrity fashion magazines, and cut and paste murder mysteries. Smart, strange, and funny, Holton's work recalls artist
Raymond Pettibon, filmmaker Miranda July and southern gothic writer Carson McCullers - all at once. There is a boy with a bird for hair, feral children who grow up to be cowboys, treeplanters who never come back, and fashionista Karl Lagerfeld perfoming a bris. Her stories, "exploring a richer, weirder understanding of language and sentiment" (Brian Joseph Davis), reveal themselves in layers - eerily straightforward and yet never quite what they seem. Visit www.emilyholton.com.

"Emily Holton's pictures and stories appear, on first blush, to have an element of the fairy tale to them, but like the most elemental fairy tales, Holton's have a barb in them. Here is the underside of innocence, childhood's back room where the fixed card game is being played, the side alley where the littlest pig's blood is running. These stories are both dark and hilarious, strangely familiar, and utterly transfixing. They'll draw laughter from your gut, but it'll catch in your throat."
-- Michael Redhill

"Nimble, deceptively simple, and heartfelt, Holton's bookworks inform like a report, but haunt like poetry."
-- Emily Schultz

Originally from Hamilton, Emily Holton graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before moving to Toronto. She recently had her first solo art show at The Centre for Culture and Leisure No. 1, which featured pages from Little Lessons in Safety. Her drawings have been published in Brick, Matrix, Kiss Machine and Broken Pencil. This is her first book.

Take a look at some sample pages.