I often characterise Australia as a place with rotten foundations that's
culturally not yet arrived at a point of being able to address that rot
My name is Helen Johnson. I'm an artist and also a teacher
I've been concerned
with addressing questions around Australian history and ideas of national
identity and how they connect to an individual sense of self
I feel like Australia culturally now is still very much tied to colonialism I
hesitate to even claim that you could say that we're in a post-colonial
context in this country because I feel like the process of colonization is
still going on. It's a big and complex question to talk about how you might
address colonial histories and legacies through art as a white person in this
country and I don't see my work as an answer to that question
Humour is something that I try to intentionally insert
I feel like humor is one of the
most powerful tools that an artist can employ
It's inviting you to think about a particular set of things, like in the
painting called 'A Feats of Reason and a Flow of Soul' (2016), all of these of official
figures in their suits and top hats and finery, you can sort of make up their
intestinal traps underneath their clothes and you can see that they're all
busting for a shit.
The fact that people can have a laugh at these guys shitting themselves doesn't
mean that they're not going to question what was being done at the time if you
can draw someone in by making them laugh about something then you've got their
attention and they can start to follow a trajectory of thought
I use a number of
different mediums. I'm really interested in creating sort of moments of push and
pull in paintings and having different registers of imagery with different
surface qualities. So one thing might be compositionally in the foreground but
materially might be being subsumed by what's behind it. The fact that some of
the images in the works are more prominent and others are more discrete
or they take longer to emerge is largely to do with thinking about the ways in
which history gets constructed and that there are certain things that always get
privileged and other things that are pushed to the side or to the background
The painting called 'Seat of Power' (2016) is to do with the process of producing a
replica of the speaker's chair that's in the Australian Parliament and there's a
text that is quite a dominant presence in that painting which describes in this
really fetishistic language the process of producing this replica. It seemed to
me like it encapsulated this sort of sycophantic relationship that Australia
continues to have to Britain on some levels, particularly on political levels
There's overlaid on that text in the painting like a satirical cartoon that
shows the House of Commons in session and it's full of people snoozing and
drinking booze and just clowning around, and it's it just kind of totally pokes
fun at the integrity of British politicians.Sso I thought it was sort of
just nice to put those two attitudes towards the same thing in relation with
one another that are quite contradictory.
Usually I'll start with a host of images
orbiting around one another and it's a process of figuring out what their
relations might be between things that that will draw something interesting out
I think it's quite important to leave space for unexpected things to occur and
to be willing to be open when that happens. I feel like the process of
painting is a meeting of conscious decisions you make and unconscious
processes and that they weave together in the work. It's never been about trying
to present a clean narrative. I think it's a point of frustration for a lot of
people in this country that the state likes to present this sanitised
narrative of colonisation that's completely disingenuous and I think art
can be one means of prodding at that