Helen Johnson
Small pool (sisters), 2022
Synthetic polymer paint and pencil on canvas
248.5 x 167 cm
97 7/8 x 65 3/4 in
97 7/8 x 65 3/4 in
Copyright The Artist
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This painting is a companion to another recently completed work, Small pool (patience), 2022. These paintings ruminate on social entanglements, making tangible unseen and unconscious levels of encounter and bond....
This painting is a companion to another recently completed work, Small pool (patience), 2022.
These paintings ruminate on social entanglements, making tangible unseen and unconscious levels of encounter and bond. The figures in these paintings are not speculative beings, but ways of figuring our being in the world—our social relations and familial connections that at times are simultaneously nurturing and extractive, inquisitive and vulnerable.
This painting was produced in the context of a year spent training as an art therapist on an acute psychiatric inpatient unit, where modes of relationality, power dynamics and unspoken meaning come to the fore and serve as a substrate for the therapeutic encounter.
In this context, art is situated as a means of connection beyond language, that can offer a space of safety, healing and connection. It is common as an art therapist to make ‘response art’ as a means to process and find ways to hold the intensity of therapeutic encounters – it is from this space of processing, and in the spirit of art as a healing and connecting force between beings, that my recent work has emerged.
How can one be a subject today under the conditions that we have created for ourselves? In this painting, subjects are implicated in one another’s being, produced by one another, nourishing one another. As I made this painting, I was thinking of my three big sisters—the way we produced one another as children and diverged as adults—but keep holding some kind of connection, even if tenuous at times.
On one layer of the painting, subjects emerge from subjects, the gaze of one becomes the being of another, whose gaze becomes the being of yet another; how we make one another as social beings. Observing and being observed. On another register, eyes become gravid, both breast-like and phallic. The question of what they are giving and what they are taking left with the viewer.
Helen Johnson, 2022
These paintings ruminate on social entanglements, making tangible unseen and unconscious levels of encounter and bond. The figures in these paintings are not speculative beings, but ways of figuring our being in the world—our social relations and familial connections that at times are simultaneously nurturing and extractive, inquisitive and vulnerable.
This painting was produced in the context of a year spent training as an art therapist on an acute psychiatric inpatient unit, where modes of relationality, power dynamics and unspoken meaning come to the fore and serve as a substrate for the therapeutic encounter.
In this context, art is situated as a means of connection beyond language, that can offer a space of safety, healing and connection. It is common as an art therapist to make ‘response art’ as a means to process and find ways to hold the intensity of therapeutic encounters – it is from this space of processing, and in the spirit of art as a healing and connecting force between beings, that my recent work has emerged.
How can one be a subject today under the conditions that we have created for ourselves? In this painting, subjects are implicated in one another’s being, produced by one another, nourishing one another. As I made this painting, I was thinking of my three big sisters—the way we produced one another as children and diverged as adults—but keep holding some kind of connection, even if tenuous at times.
On one layer of the painting, subjects emerge from subjects, the gaze of one becomes the being of another, whose gaze becomes the being of yet another; how we make one another as social beings. Observing and being observed. On another register, eyes become gravid, both breast-like and phallic. The question of what they are giving and what they are taking left with the viewer.
Helen Johnson, 2022