There’s Something About John Walsh
Featured Image: Aleesha Khan & Adomas Lukas Petrauskas
John Walsh’s commitment to Manchester Metropolitan University spanned nearly 20 years and his legacy stands as an ever-curious experimental extraordinaire. His passing was a wholly unexpected tragedy and his absence still feels heavy amongst family, friends, peers and students.
Walsh, Subject Leader for the MA/MFA Graphic Design and Art Direction and the MA/MFA Illustration programmes, was best known for his long list of accomplishments in the world of design. From his early work with Manchester’s own Factory Records, 808 State, and Band on the Wall to his role as an educator of emerging creatives, Walsh’s influence was wide and far-reaching.
Walsh’s impact can be felt across campus – even in the very magazine you’re holding right now. aAh! wouldn’t be what it is today without him. His reimagining of the publication in 2018, in collaboration with his graphic design cohort and project coordinator Natalie Carragher, transformed what was Humanity Hallows to the magazine before you. Setting a new precedent for striking and playful editorial design, ‘The UGLY Issue’ marked the beginning of a new era for aAh! and Walsh’s love for the unpredictable and absurd, which radiated throughout his work, continues to play a key role in aAh!’s visual identity.
“I fondly remember working with John on the magazine,” says former aAh! designer and Manchester School of Art graduate Nick Stone, who worked on the first issue following the rebrand. “We had a room set up for the six of us, or so, where we could work. It felt like a proper editorial design team – good spreads up on the wall and drafts printed out all over the place. He would drop in if we were there and give his thoughts, or give us ways of doing things we’d have never thought of.”
Stone continues: “He is 100% the reason I went into editorial design. Without him I wouldn’t have had the ideas, knowledge or portfolio to be able to get a job in that world. Since then I’ve worked on all sorts of books, and in senior positions at The Telegraph and The i Paper – which I never would have dreamed of. I still try and imagine what feedback he might give if he were looking at spreads I’d designed. He made it quite clear you didn’t have to be an arsehole to be a clever designer.”
Walsh had a taste for the weird and wonderful, in both his teachings and his consumption of art. Always armed with a niche reference to point his students towards, Walsh’s quirky expertise poured out of him like a fountain of knowledge. His students recall his conversations opening up completely new and unexpected ideas. “John came into and left my life in no less than a year,” says graphic design student Aleesha Khan. “And yet, I now see the world around me through his wonderfully peculiar, sentimental lens. Do the weird and unexpected thing. Don’t hold back. Take it off the screen, cut it up and stick it back together.”
To someone like Walsh, obsessions were something to be excited about, not shamed for. His past students embraced his advice that rabbit holes are worth venturing into. It was those quirks and perspective shifts that encouraged his students to authentically explore their passions and interests wholly, just as he did. Walsh’s personal obsessions allowed him to honour his own experiences as a creature of habit as well as an inquisitive, spirited explorer. You only have to look at his #lifties – the playful selfies that he took in the School of Art’s lifts as he began and finished each day – to get a glimpse into his joyful way of seeing the world. And who could forget his daily lunch order at The Eighth Day on Oxford Road? His eating habits may have remained the same for the last 20-odd years, but John’s PhD establishing a framework for the science of graphic communication highlights just how powerfully unique and revolutionary his work could be to his students.
Marcela Sobrinho was one of Walsh’s pupils and the first recipient of the John Walsh Prize for Experimental Graphic Design – an award founded in his honour by his life-long partner, Debbie. Sobrinho remembers Walsh’s passion for symbols which helped fuel her own symbol-based language, ‘A Palanvara‘. “Walsh really pushed ‘A Palanvara’ forward,” she says. “I had no idea that his PhD was dedicated to symbols. In one of my crit sessions with other coursemates he went to his office and brought back some A4 sheets of Egyptian hieroglyphics that he was trying to translate. He was so excited to see something like what he was studying in my work.”
“Being presented with the award was really huge,” Sobrinho continues. “I had no idea how little time I would get with John. That crit session was two days before his passing, and I had no idea it would be the last I would see him. He would just stare at my page and try to make sense of it, just like his sheets of symbols. It felt really special, like being passed the torch.”
“The last project we worked on under his tutelage was themed around the weight of emotion and self-censorship,” says Khan. Such heavy topics and abrupt goodbyes have been an important reminder about endings, especially those that are unexpected and severe. John showed us the importance of living authentically, embracing confusion and ridiculousness but most importantly, to keep experimenting.
Grief is a funny thing. It bears incredible weight, debilitates and sometimes even destabilises us altogether. Everyone has a unique or maybe even transient relationship with it. But most importantly, it reminds us of the presence and impact of a single individual. This piece – this entire magazine – is dedicated to the memory of John Walsh and everything he embodied.
Thank you, John.
– aAh! Magazine
