Overview
Born 1979 in Melbourne, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne.
As a painter, Helen Johnson has worked for many years at a large scale depicting life-sized figures, often on unstretched canvas. Working life-sized produces what she thinks of as a social relation between the viewer and the represented figure, beyond a strictly aesthetic experience. Johnson's work draws upon both personal, immediate experience and broader observations, socio-cultural and historical. An ongoing interest is the construction of national identity in Australia and the ways in which contemporary Australian society relates to the legacies and continuities of colonisation.
