Anita Johnson, The Secret Lives of Things from Defiance Gallery on Vimeo.


My art practice focuses on our relationships with familiar objects and how they are connected to feelings of longing, invoke memory and explore language, place, and women's experiences. I see salvaged objects to be akin to a type of shorthand material language, as they can instantly connect us to complex memories of events and emotions beyond words, discussing complex socio-political issues in a poetic way. The objects I use in my artworks are salvaged from the tip or the verge, and most are originally from the domestic realm of the home. They have an intimacy with the human body, many are prosthetic sense objects in which our sense of boundary of the self is lost within the object. Chairs, tables, hot-water bottles, crutches, ladders, beds, cots, hand-tools, gloves, shoes and musical instruments, such objects can be strong sites of longing, fear, desire, loss and identity. I also like to play with language and the terminology of objects, to alter how we perceive a thing.

I am interested in alternative understandings of repair as opposed to restoration to former wholeness and utility. I make visible my gestures of repair toward broken objects and purposefully employ materials that have a reference to the human body materially. Felt, hair, wax and textiles embody the object. I suggest that objects could have parallel lives and hardships to our own. I repair them into new autonomous objects, free to leap across the room, to play, to retaliate, to be other than they are expected to be, to go beyond their objecthood. The ordinary object becomes a psychological and emotive object.

I particularly like using objects that are marked by traces of the absent human through the wear and tear of regular use. There is an aesthetic of longing in these objects that I find draws me in. Absence is also felt when functionality of an object is denied, and consequently we become aware of the very nature of the object itself, its materiality. I also make casts (or ghosts) of objects in various materials, porcelain, bronze, felt  and beeswax. I consider my body as a collected object to make work with. Making direct casts of my feet, hands, ears, lips and breasts.

Felt has been a longterm interest as an intriguing sculptural material, with one foot in our Neolithic nomadic past and one foot in industrial society. Making felt is a laboriously physical action, made directly with the hand, agitating the wool fibres to encourage them to entangle together. The performative element of feltmaking lends vitality to the material that is often palpable. Felt is a matrix, non-linear, without axis, constantly in flux, shifting during and after it’s forming. Often perceived to be a lowly material of necessity, it is found laying underneath the floorboards, in between the cogs in machines, inside musical instruments and wrapped around nomads houses. I engage felt as symbolic narrative, a healing substance, a sensory allure and an insulation device. Like other textiles of haptic allure, felt has an immediate intimacy with the viewer’s own body, but also to animal nature, often engaging direct visceral responses.

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About


My art practice focuses on our relationships with familiar objects and how they are connected to feelings of longing, invoke memory and explore language, place, and women's experiences. I see salvaged objects to be akin to a type of shorthand material language, as they can instantly connect us to complex memories of events and emotions beyond words, discussing complex socio-political issues in a poetic way. The objects I use in my artworks are salvaged from the tip or the verge, and most are originally from the domestic realm of the home. They have an intimacy with the human body, many are prosthetic sense objects in which our sense of boundary of the self is lost within the object. Chairs, tables, hot-water bottles, crutches, ladders, beds, cots, hand-tools, gloves, shoes and musical instruments, such objects can be strong sites of longing, fear, desire, loss and identity. I also like to play with language and the terminology of objects, to alter how we perceive a thing.

I am interested in alternative understandings of repair as opposed to restoration to former wholeness and utility. I make visible my gestures of repair toward broken objects and purposefully employ materials that have a reference to the human body materially. Felt, hair, wax and textiles embody the object. I suggest that objects could have parallel lives and hardships to our own. I repair them into new autonomous objects, free to leap across the room, to play, to retaliate, to be other than they are expected to be, to go beyond their objecthood. The ordinary object becomes a psychological and emotive object.

I particularly like using objects that are marked by traces of the absent human through the wear and tear of regular use. There is an aesthetic of longing in these objects that I find draws me in. Absence is also felt when functionality of an object is denied, and consequently we become aware of the very nature of the object itself, its materiality. I also make casts (or ghosts) of objects in various materials, porcelain, bronze, felt  and beeswax. I consider my body as a collected object to make work with. Making direct casts of my feet, hands, ears, lips and breasts.

Felt has been a longterm interest as an intriguing sculptural material, with one foot in our Neolithic nomadic past and one foot in industrial society. Making felt is a laboriously physical action, made directly with the hand, agitating the wool fibres to encourage them to entangle together. The performative element of feltmaking lends vitality to the material that is often palpable. Felt is a matrix, non-linear, without axis, constantly in flux, shifting during and after it’s forming. Often perceived to be a lowly material of necessity, it is found laying underneath the floorboards, in between the cogs in machines, inside musical instruments and wrapped around nomads houses. I engage felt as symbolic narrative, a healing substance, a sensory allure and an insulation device. Like other textiles of haptic allure, felt has an immediate intimacy with the viewer’s own body, but also to animal nature, often engaging direct visceral responses.

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