ILKLEY Grammar School technician and artist John Cockshaw is staging a thought-provoking show of internationally acclaimed artists and writers at Bank Street Arts Gallery in Sheffield.

The exhibition will run throughout September, as part of a Festival of Book Arts called ‘Opening up the Book’ organised by the gallery with support from Sheffield Hallam University, Arts Council England and other organisations.

Within this festival John is independently curating an exhibition titled ‘Evil in the Shining Light’ across two gallery spaces that takes inspiration primarily from the works of JRR Tolkien and will delve deep into thematic elements of the author's writing.

The featured artists joining John will be Soni Alcorn-Hender, Tomas Hijo, Jay Johnstone, Tsvetelina Krumova, Ted Nasmith and Katarzyna Chmiel-Gugulska and will display a range of work in lino-print, graphite, paint, photography and calligraphy. In response to the position that much fantasy art is stale, kitsch and garish it is intended that this exhibition will reveal a scholarly and contemporary approach to visualising this genre of art, specifically focusing on JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Guest contributors include writer Marcel Aubron-Bülles and Leeds-based archaeologist Shaun Richardson who will extend the scholarly content of the show in interesting and unexpected ways.

A second element of the exhibition focusses on the moving image and the fantasy/science fiction genres combined with the graphic novel book format. In association with independent publisher Luna Press Publishing, John Cockshaw and writer Robert S. Malan will screen a 12 minute short video collaboration ‘The Sign of the Shining Beast’ at the gallery.

This video project has simultaneously been developed as a graphic novel/photography book and is slated to be released at a book launch by Luna Press at the Mancunicon Sci-Fi convention in Manchester in 2016.

This exhibition will form just one part of a whole three-month festival of book arts in Sheffield and will also coincide with the release of two books this summer that John has been involved in with Canadian-based publisher Oloris Publishing; an art volume of his own work and an illustrated book of poetry by poet Janet Nelson-Alvarez.