SOLAR PRINTS
(ONGOING)
SOLAR PRINTS, ongoing
This project is made possible by a grant from New York State Council on the Arts
Project proposal:
Birth and death are intricately intertwined. This series of heat-based prints — made with the sun — enquires: what is the relationship of the beginnings of our contemporary industrialized era to what some anticipate to be its end. What came before? What will come after?
In response to these questions, the artist employs a repertoire of literal and symbolic historical building-blocks of our western society: Brick and cotton denim, both products of the very industry they built and clothed, the factory system and mechanized textile production. First, sourcing these incidental artifacts from the rivers and streams of a former agricultural dairy hub and from vintage clothing collections, the artist then returns these industrially produced materials to their unformed states. This transformation accelerates the geological process of erosion, and wear and tear — unstitching the seams of old jeans — thus reprocessing these raw materials. For this reprocessing, the artist employs natural elements: water and solar heat, binding pigment to canvas with a solution of locally produced whey byproduct. This process alchemizes storied materials of the industrial era, composting functionally obsolete artifacts through a ritual that calls us into the essential awareness of our ancient human connection with the elemental forces and rhythms we are inextricably bound to.
This project builds on existing themes and explorations in Emily Johnston’s drawing, painting and photography practice: recording sunlight as it moves through domestic spaces, tracing projected light from a moving image, foraged sourcing and hand processing of rock into pigment then paint, documenting and recording of the geological context for these found materials, and finally painting with earth pigment paints and cyanotype sun-printing with stone material. In this new body of work, the artist moves from sourcing raw mineral material from streams and cliffs to make paint, to the transmuting of previously processed earth-matter into a “re-rawed” pigment material. Her use of cyanotype chemistry is replaced with a solar heat-based process: the brick pigment is first applied to a canvas of deconstructed work clothing, then partially masked before being to sunlight. As the sun dries the textile, its heat pulls the pigment out from under the masked area leaving (work samples 8 and 9).
With this project, Emily Johnston also builds on the work and values of other artistswhose practices source pigment directly from the land and human-made materials. Artist and archivist Tilke Elkins’ Wild Pigment Project established a significant archive of earth pigments from around the world and wove a global network of artists working with foraged pigment. The unifying values and activism of her “Rules for ResponsibleForaging” draw on indigenous wisdom and suggest socially and ecologically responsible approaches to working with the natural world as artists. Thomas Little makes ink from the ferrous matter in guns and has documented in drawings from the resulting ink, the sites of mass-shootings in the state of North Carolina.
Heidi Gustafson’s work with and writings on ochres delve into the complex layers of human relationship with the environment. She elucidates some of the many ecological, geological, biological, historical, prehistorical, and spiritual intersections of human life with earth pigments.
Insomuch as it draws from the paths forged by these artists’ practices and bodies of work, Solar Return seeks to further the investigation into how the things we make and how we make them impact our human understanding of ourselves, the meaning of our existence, and our future actions. These questions arise for Emily Johnston in the context of our current ecological collapse and the urgent need for new ways of living in relationship to our earth home.
The first works from SOLAR RETURN will be shown in the context of the exhibition Symbiocene Era II at Bushel Collective, opening October 2025 in Delhi, NY. The artist will host an artist talk and earth pigment process workshop in the context of this exhibition.