ANIMATE EARTH

ANIMATE EARTH, Weird Specialty, Tivoli NY, 2023

Duet exhibition with ceramicist Sarah Mitchell-Davison

Emily Johnston is best known for her large scale abstract photographs of landscapes and of ash on snow, (a series entitled ASH DRAWINGS). Her drawings on paper and canvas, concerned with the intersection of her own internal physical rhythms — breath, heartbeat, nervous system states — with external cycles of the natural world and social disruptions, and the way these emerge in the act of mark-making. The most recent evolution of her practice finds a deeper rooting in the natural world. In processing locally found rock into paint and stream water for works on canvas, paper and wood, Johnston interrogates and reimagines her own relationship to the land, examining the cultural forces that threaten the natural world, in the context of geological time. The process is spiritual and rooted in a desire for transformation: of our human relationship with the land. In offering a frame of geological time to our day to day experiences, Emily’s paintings, reverently made from the earth itself, embody the possibility for a different future for our planet than the uncertain one we now foresee.