A retrospective interview with Zinta Jaunitis by Diane Hutchinson, February 2024
Every so often, you meet someone in a way that leaves a lasting impression. That’s what happened when I met Diane Hutchinson at a pop-up exhibition exactly one year ago.
Some of my work was on display, and I noticed her hovering around it long enough for me to feel the urge to speak to her. As an artist, you put things into the world, and once they’re out there, you have no control over how they’ll be received. Maybe I was seeking validation, or maybe it was simply the human need for connection, but there is something profoundly satisfying about having someone reflect your work back to you—so articulately and insightfully.
It turns out Diane is in the business of communication, and she’s exceptionally good at it. But what struck me most was how attentively she listened as I was reaching to put my thoughts into words about my own work. One thing led to another, and soon, we were sitting in an East London café, where she was interviewing me. Diane has a gift for interpreting and expanding on words in a way that feels both thoughtful and illuminating. That conversation—her ability to listen not just to me, but to my work—led to this retrospective interview.
The words that emerged from that exchange have found their way into so many aspects of my artistic practice: from my online presence to writing copy for a brochure, to applications.
But what made this encounter truly memorable was the feeling that we were both seen.
Tell us about the Leporello format, and why you have chosen to use it for much of your recent work.
A leporello is a general term for a kind of concertina book. Its origins can be traced to Mozart’s 18th century opera “Don Giovanni”, where Giovanni’s servant Leporello, pulls out a list of his masters conquests, a cascading booklet that gathers at his feet as it unravels to reveal more than 2000 women!
Like many artists before me, I’ve been inspired by the possibilities of the format and the escape it offers from the rectangular page. For me, the process of drawing in one continuous flow, connecting and layering marks and drawings, is something that reveals rather than dictates a narrative. The liminal space that sits between pages – the creases of the concertina folds – allows for the exploration of something that might feel unresolved. It’s a voyage for both artist and viewer: a journey rather than a destination.
The leporello allows me to move materials across the page to create a dialogue. When I'm moving across panels, I'm also looking back and seeing motifs, forms or marks that I might pick up again on the next one, so there's a dialogue with elements that I'm putting on the paper. The format allows me to go forwards as well as backwards and build up layers that in turn create a narrative.
Merav Soloman, an Israeli book artist working with the leporello format, used the term ‘visual poetics’ to describe her work. She challenges conventional notions of what a book might be by creating pieces that are intentionally incomplete. That phrase, and the idea of a fragmented narrative, really resonated with me and my own process. My artwork “She sheds her skin”, was originally inspired by a poem by Sylvia Lindsteadt, then interwoven and layered with personal memories and the observed world around me. I worked intuitively, guided by my materials and the expressive marks they make and traces they leave behind. The work combines collage, blended soft pastels, and charcoal with the use of a rubber to create luminous and blurred images which give a dream-like quality. As the panels unfold, they reveal not only the interconnectedness of the various elements within the artwork but also the interconnectedness of our own stories, both real and imagined. It’s an invitation, to you, the viewer to reflect upon your individual memories and lived experiences.
I also love the tactile quality of the form. It’s an object which you have to hold and unfold to reveal the contents, which is in itself a kind of dialogue between the artist and the viewer. It demands careful handling which feels like a radical act in today's digital age.
Tell us more about the exploration of liminal spaces in your work?
Liminal spaces, for me, are those intriguing meeting points that might sit between two worlds or two cultures. My father who was Latvian recently passed away. I was aware of wanting to reconnect with my heritage and that interesting tension about not knowing the language, and translation becoming the outcome of a dialogue between two cultures, languages and sensibilities - exploring almost the poetry of translating Latvian to English. Liminal spaces can be an area of exchange or translation; how I obtain and then use fragments of texts in my work to create a dialogue.
But they might also be about the place where a Japanese tradition and a Western interpretation of that meet. The idea of hanging a two dimensional artwork on a wall is a largely Western concept. The Japanese and Chinese were less constrained by those ideas, using calligraphy scrolls to explore narrative or create more three dimensional art. I’m currently researching and making my version of a Japanese folding screen, a painstaking process which involves building up layers of strong, translucent paper stretched over a wooden frame, with complex butterfly hinges which allow the screen to lie flat or open up to either side. Again, you have the idea of these liminal spaces, the hinges between the individual screens.
It’s interesting that you choose quite structured forms – the screens, the leporellos to explore something that is unresolved or in flow?
Yes. I could create a flat piece of artwork, but it's the exploration of the drawing combined with these forms that open up some other possibilities. I love the work of the Lebanese-American poet-artist Etel Adnan. In terms of liminal space, she's crosses the thresholds of at least three different cultures; Arabic, French and American. She also experiences the same thing about not knowing the language of her forefathers. She describes the leporello in such a beautiful way, as ‘writing a river’.
My process is very intuitive, but in terms of the way I present that, I am more meticulous - possibly due to my background in graphic design. I’m very aware of the means of presentation. How do I communicate this thing? I like the contrast between a more formal structure and the way it allows for freedom of movement and expression. There is that narrative aspect, the ability to explore motifs and repetition across the surface. And there is another dimension - a temporal quality - of being able to go back and revisit and rework something. I always work from left to right, but one panel informs the next. I don't jump panels, although I might go backwards.
I’m working on a piece at the moment inspired by The Yellow Wallpaper, a novel by Charlotte Gilman Perkins which explores that blurred the space between the imagined and the real. I started it in 2022 and I’ve now gone back to it, introducing new layers and mark-making to build that narrative.
Is colour an important element in your work?
Colour has been a bit of a journey for me. When I started out I mainly used black and white and I still love black and white imagery. I find colour can often create an allure that can be distracting. Sometimes I feel I can see more in black and white, particularly when you're dealing with content that might be haunting or melancholic. It's a different experience. You do lose control of the narrative a little it when you introduce colour – it’s so subjective.
It’s not a strict rule, but when I start a new leporello, I try to keep it to no more than three colours, because they can become too loud very quickly. I usually lay down some kind of a foundation to cover the whole thing. I might get some pastels and start mark-making and rubbing into some areas, and at that point colour may come into it. It’s the way I go about attacking the white canvas!
What are your pre-occupations as an artist?
As an artist there are things I keep coming back to. Liminal spaces, things that exist in the margins. There always seems to be an element of journey in my work, a movement from one place to another, like a piece of music which might carry you along and express both sadness and joy. The leporello is the perfect format for that. It isn’t fixed or grounded and can sort of transcend time and space to create an ethereal quality. I’m always trying to resist the notion of themes or articulation. The world forces you to explain yourself but I like to sit with the process of exploration and not rush to resolution. Life is full of ambiguity and, if anything, my work reflects that.
I do find myself going back to the idea of the circus as a metaphor for the human experience. Circus is about groups of people that live on the margins, who are not really accepted in society and are constantly on the move. There are so many contrasts – the beautiful and the grotesque, the strong and the delicate, the spectacle of performance and the mundanity of life on the road. There are those moments of ‘Ta-Dah’ but there is so much that needs to happen to get to that point. Those are the spaces that interest me, not explicitly, but my work touches on it.
Are there any formative experiences from childhood that have influenced your work?
My dad worked in advertising. He was very creative, a great draughtsman. We used to play a game where he would draw things from a very unusual angle and we had to guess what it was. They would be so abstract – like where the vacuum cleaner hose joins the main body. Even an exercise like that is a formative one – he never drew anything we could actually guess! He was at the height of his creativity in the 70s and 80s, working in a very physical, hands-on way with sheets of Letraset and developing photographs. There were always lots of equipment, always a project on the go. At the beginning of every school year he would supply our stationery- we would each have our own little paper bags with our sets for the year. Even during my degree I was never very interested in the digital. I always navigated towards print and work where I could use my hands.
What drives you as an artist?
I’m interested in how we mediate our experience and communicate it in a way that opens it up rather than fixes it. My view of human experience is that there is always something better out there. You might start in a sad or melancholic place but something happens in the journey to offer some light or joy in contrast to that.
I guess my work is my own - maybe naïve – way of navigating life. I like the idea of art as a means of expression or of being able to make sense of the world in some way. It’s not about resolution. I feel I will never get resolution in this life, but there is a therapeutic element to expression. My practice is almost a way of pushing out the heaviness of life, of human experience, of pushing it out through your hands, of manipulating it through the making and the materiality of what I do. Working with pastels, I’m physically squashing it and moving it around, there’s something very physical and malleable about pushing it around the paper. The same can be said when I prepare a plate and pass it through a printing press.
But I also like that you can’t be too precise with that process. You control your materials to a degree but there is an element of chance and that’s how I like introduce joy into my work. Passing a piece of work through a print process might throw something new into the mix or I might close my eyes and see how that affects the mark-making. I want that element of surprise that lifts you out of the inevitability of the process. Like lifting you out of the mundanity of life. if I don’t have chance in my work. I don’t find it very…happy. You sometimes get these beautiful accidents with hand-made processes and I take great joy in that.
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