Clare Johnson
Creative Practice
The fact that we can only exist in one time and place is both an ordinary truth and a tragic one. We inevitably lose loved ones, have to live away from friends, see landscapes change, wish we could relive some great day. My work is a futile yet sincere attempt to locate and recover these lost things. It tries to let us exist again with what has slipped away, hovering between now and then. Persistent themes include memory, absence, growing up, fragmentation, nostalgia, and in-betweenness. I'm inspired by the experience of reading a book, whereby one can be alone but feel the presence of other people's thoughts and experiences - and can even, in a limited way, transcend physical location. I also look to the idea of a band-aid, a profoundly ordinary object that both identifies a wound and acts as a healing attention to it. My art should operate like both of these things - vividly depicting an absent time, place or person without ever fully recovering it, soothing our perpetual losses by mourning them.
Excerpts from my ongoing Post-it Note Project are currently being published online by Seattle Review of Books
Additional recent work can be seen on my Instagram page
Please visit my Biography page to find upcoming exhibitions and publications.