“You must have been in strange places”
Helen Johnson
4 June → 19 June 2004
You must have been in strange places exists in a region of paradox where the compulsion to fill unknown spaces with imaginings collides with the [colonial] desire to capture, manage and tame the landscape – how we inhabit the landscape, and in turn how it occupies us. It is concerned with the re-making of meaning at points where different modes of understanding intersect.
To refer to an idea of nature is to refer to a construct arising from a cultural outlook. Here the referee takes the form of an environment which is both real and imagined, soft and sinister, becoming a representative of the intractable nature of the landscape as it exists in our perceptions.
Helen Johnson is interested in art as a social tool and as a means of inciting discussion and raising questions. Her art practice centres on the making of meaning using painting, and also includes writing and curating.