Michelle Johnson

As an installation artist, I have a history of making unconventional messes, intimidating spills and beautiful splats. My employment is as a nurse, I work with people in direct and intimate bodily ways. My work as an artist is a reflection upon those lived experiences. The poetics of bodies is captured and translated by rubber latex and silicone. These rubber compounds have a plastic workability, an adaptive nature that allows me to articulate evocative moments. Painting an epidermis onto this adaptive bark, I have marked the healing scars on this tree; caused by the wires that encircled it. Wires placed on the tree to serve the people that lived here have remained, forgotten and now integrated. Transforming liquid silicone rubber into skin and then into scab poetically captures my admiration for this tree and it’s adaptations; indexing the integral strength and healing that occurs despite the wires. Michelle Johnson-2012 main page