When I graduated from art school, I left Cape Town on a freight ship and worked my way to Europe. I lived a wild life of political activism and abandon and made art that I sold on the streets. The deliberate uprooting and unpredictability of this time served to shake and reshape my spirit. It felt important to me as a white South African to experience poverty and marginalisation. Though not easy, this time was liberating for me on many levels.
Concepts of consciousness, liminality, belonging, and storytelling inform Tanya P Johnson’s work.
How did your tryst with art begin?
I have been making art for as long as I remember. When I was a little girl, my mother was a weaver. I would spend hours drawing beneath her large loom, and would annoy my friends on play dates because I always wanted to draw. When I was around six my parents enrolled me in an extra-mural art school as well as in ballet, modern dance and piano. The high school I attended was arts oriented, after which I attended the University of Cape Town where I received my degree in fine art.
What is the primary role of an artist? How do you describe yourself in the context of challenging people’s perspectives via your work and art?
The role of artist is to tell the truth. Of course, there is no consensus on reality and truth is composed of everyone’s version thereof. The countless expressions of art thus reveal the diversity of human experience and perception. This reflection of the human spirit is vital in a top heavy and increasingly homogenised world. The artist is a voice for the zeitgeist or time-spirit, for the people, the collective and culture. As the grip of the western colonial upside down mind and media prescribed indoctrination tightens, artists (visual, dance, literature, theatre, poets) have the role of linking humans with consciousness, their own and the universal.
My work is, in part, concerned with the exploration of thresholds, and the search for meaning and form to articulate liminal spaces. I am interested in the place where the light meets the dark, the space between the living and ancestral worlds, between art and ritual. Rendering seen the unseen. The presentation of these ideas in my work might challenge the viewer to consider alternative paradigms.
How do you deal with the conceptual difficulty and uncertainty of creating work?
Concepts develop in two ways for me. Sometimes I am inspired to explore a concept or series of thoughts and this will develop into a project of piece of work. Often, though, concepts emerge from and through the process of making. My approach to work is usually intuitive. The way I experience and describe this approach, particularly in reference to new work, is a sense of the work existing in a shadowy or misty place just beyond arm’s reach. I can sense its presence and potential, and it is only in the making that it starts to come into sharper focus. This directs me to the research required and creates the field wherein I shape ideas and themes. In terms of uncertainty, I feel that a foundation of faith is key to my practice.
Riverspine, 2011. Photo credit: Jeremy Addington.
Let’s talk about the evolution of your practice over the years. Tell us about your commitment to your current medium.
I am more committed to my visual language and sensibilities than I am to a particular medium. I call painting my first language and it is the medium in which I majored. However, in the last ten years I have translated the way I see and communicate imagery and form into various media. This includes mixed media drawing, archival photography collage, print making, found object assemblage, installation and paper cutting. I select the medium according to the content of my investigations and also to the ways in which my hands and internal vision are drawn. A factor, too, is the response to an exhibition space or commission. Whichever medium or combination thereof is chosen my process is obsessive. Also, writing is a thread that binds ideas together.
Let’s talk about your artistic journey. What were your biggest lessons and hiccups along the way?
When I graduated from art school, I left Cape Town on a freight ship and worked my way to Europe. I lived a wild life of political activism and abandon and made art that I sold on the streets. The deliberate uprooting and unpredictability of this time served to shake and reshape my spirit. It felt important to me as a white South African to experience poverty and marginalisation. Though not easy, this time was liberating for me on many levels.
My experience of collaborations has shown me that process can be slower and ideas pushed further. I participated in the performance arts festival, Infecting the City in Cape Town that challenged the 16 artists to form groups of four after a few hours of meeting one another. We were given a budget, selected a site in the city and then spent a couple of months collaborating on a work. This process was compressed and stimulating. I was the only fine artist, the others being performers, dancers, directors etc. Although I had worked with performance artists previously, it was challenging to pour my vision into a pool of collaboratively generated ideas for a performance piece.
When I had a baby on each hip and was expressing anxiety to my friend about not producing work, she said, “Stop worrying. Georgia O’Keefe made her best work in her ’80s”.
Shrine, 2019. From Conversation with my Dead Self. Photo credit: Jeremy Addington.
How does your audience interact and react to your work?
When an artist puts work out into the world, it is impossible to know how it is received and understood. I am told that viewers experience a potency and power in my work that moves them. I had an exhibition in 2009 called Lines in Blood and Milk. In the book of comments, I read many messages expressing the deep impact of the work. There was one entry that read, “This work is very interesting. Give her ten years and she will be on her game.” Even though this was in a sea of complimentary messages, it was hard to accept. I was very affected by the honesty of the words. It has been ten years since this message! A reflection I got from the installation Afterlife of a House that I created for the Nakanojo Biennale in Japan last August is that the work looked and felt like me.
Let’s talk about your frameworks, references and process. What inspires you?
My work is concerned with concepts of consciousness, liminality, belonging and storytelling and in notions of paradigm as enforced by language, cosmology and culture. It is informed by ideas of colonial accountability, my work as a land defender and my interest in transformation, the supernatural and ancestors.
I live in a rural area and spend a lot of time walking in the mountains with my black wolf dog. I do much of my thinking and downloading while walking. I am inspired by the natural world and the beauty of the land. I am also inspired by the ways in which different cultures express themselves, in particular how some indigenous people have intact relationships with their cultures, languages and land.
I am inspired by other artists and their work and by the way certain writers string words together. Music has the capacity to completely undo and reshape me. My yoga practice is intrinsic to my life and is one way that I connect my intentions with the Universe. Another way is through my participation in certain plant medicine ceremonies.
Anthropomorph and Anachronism, 2016, 2019. From Edge of the Light and Afterlife of a House.
What are you looking for when you look at other artists’ work? Which shows, performances and experiences have shaped your creative process? Who are your maestros?
I am lucky in that I travel quite extensively and have been exposed to many artists and their work. I have an internal barometer that I access when viewing work. I look for art experience that shifts me on a cellular level, a response that will manifest somatically in my body. While I am impressed with fantastic technique and challenging concepts, the work that draws me towards it is that which has a frequency or spirit that vibrates with mine.
I can fall in love with unlaboured brushstrokes and certain placements of storied objects and how music interacts with performance. I am influenced and awed by many artists. I was invited by William Kentridge’s team to see the scenography he created for the opera, The Nose. I watched this inspiring work from the director’s booth at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
A show that informed my work was at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. It was a collection of effigies, charms, and medicine bundles. Although it irked me that these powerful spiritual objects had been taken from their cultures, I was inspired by the forms and energy the pieces carried.
I saw an exhibition at the Textile Museum in Oaxaca City in Mexico that inspired me to integrate fabric and sewing elements into my installations.
Brett Bailey’s performance installation, Exhibit B, that I saw in Berlin was one of the most powerful works I have ever experienced. Shiota Chiharu’s The Soul Trembles that I saw in Tokyo was a very inspiring exhibition.
I am influenced by collage artists such as Hannah Hoch, Geoffrey Farmer, Kensuke Koike, John Stezaker and Deborah Roberts. Drawing artists such as Henrik Drescher, William Kentridge and Ruth Marten. The photography of Roger Ballen, Pieter Hugo, Richard Mosse and Charles Fréger. The assemblage of Philadelphia Wire Man, Monica Canilao and Judith Scott.
The mixed media installations of Nick Cave, Annette Messager, Mark Dion and Ossip. The printmaking of Brodsky and Utkin. The papercutting of Swoon. Painters such as Egon Schiele, Lionel Smit and Faith47, to name a few. I am inspired by so called outsider art, shamanic art, archival photographs and storied objects found in antique stores and images of shrines, icons and altars.
Samson, 2019. Photo credit: Nardus Engelbrecht.
Let’s get imaginative. What kind of a service or product in your opinion would alleviate artists’ stress?
Artists spend much of their time trying to secure funding for their work. Support around compiling proposals and connecting artists with funding bodies, including patrons and private funders would be helpful.
What was your first sale? Do you handle the commercials yourself or is it outsourced to a gallery or an agent?
When I was six or seven, I made my first sale to a child in junior school who bought a drawing of a dog, I think. The next day I had commissions from almost the whole class who also wanted to buy originals! I still handle the commercial aspects of my practice.
Artists often experience contradicting motivations between the commercial and the creative. How do you strike a balance?
I tend to focus more on the authenticity of my practice than on the commercial aspects. However, I do put a lot of energy into writing grants to financially facilitate the work. I take commissions fairly regularly and do funding initiatives on social media with wood and lino prints. In Canada, an artist receives a fee for exhibiting in a public gallery, for artist talks and for some residencies. This has been helpful. I continue to have faith that the commercial and creative streams of my practice will overlap more.
Story Keepers, 2018, Land Art Mongolia Biennale. Photo credit: Bat-Orgil Battulga.
How does your interaction with a curator, gallery or client evolve?
My initial interactions are usually business like and polite. As the relationship evolves with time and experience together, I tend to relate on a more human level. I like to be real with people and this, it seems, generates an energy of connectivity and honesty, and even playfulness. Sharing work with others and/or preparing to exhibit work is a process of exposing oneself and inviting the viewer to step closer. As my work is a deep exploration and consideration of my own consciousness and perception of the world(s) I inhabit, it is virtually impossible to be ‘strictly business’ when working with curators. Of course, respect and good communication is key, especially regarding scheduling, contract agreements, and sales.
The process I experience with a commission is usually very personal, particularly for a painting. Often I will ask the client to share ideas, stories, feelings, and dreams from which I draw imagery.
Are you more of a studio artist or naturally collaborative by nature? How do you feel about commissions?
Historically, my practice has been solo, generating work in my studio for exhibition. In the last few years I have had more opportunity for collaboration, particularly with Brett Bailey, a South African artist, director, and installation maker. I contributed to his performance work, Sanctuary, in Athens in 2017. And in 2018-19, I collaborated on his theatre work, Samson. I was part of a small collective called the Muriels/Feral Five. We painted murals together in the region where I live. I love accepting commissions.
What are you working on now? What’s coming next season?
ShapeShift, a new body of work will include installation, painting and mixed media collage drawings. Exhibition venues and dates are to be announced.
Hypnagogia. In Three Halves, Mediations Biennale Polska, Poland. September- Samson, Festival d’Avignon, France, July 2020.
A multimedia theatre production written and directed by Brett Bailey. I collaborated on scenography, costume and objects used on stage. My imagery was created from mixed media drawing, painting, ink, collage and paper-cutting. The digital collages Bailey and I produced were animated by Kirsti Cummings of Zimbabwe. Samson debuted at Woordfees festival, Stellenbosch University, and The National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa.
October 2020. Hypnagogia will explore the boundary between sleep and waking states, collating this with the line between the living and ancestral dimensions. The work will metabolize mythological and personal ideas of the underworld/otherworld/afterlife. The title references the transitional experience of consciousness when falling into the otherworld of sleep and dream. The catalyst for this piece is a letter written by my deceased grandmother, wherein I learnt of my ancestral connection to Poland, dating my people – Jewish vassals – back to the 1200s. I will explore ideas of the otherworld through two ancestors mentioned in the letter, one sister, La Belle, escaped a convent with her lover, and the other, La Bonne, eloped with a soldier taking only her lute. A Bear and a Wolf will be their guides on their journey through the Underworld, where they encounter imagined chthonic elements and chimerical creatures.
Orfeus, South Africa, March 2021.
Second in the trilogy of works on which Brett Bailey and I are collaborating. In Orfeus, Bailey is adapting the classical Greek myth of the first poet musician whose art revealed the underlying order of the world. In his hero-journey into the Underworld, Orfeus encountered several souls trapped in eternal states of torment by the ruthless Hades. Our interpretation will contextualize the myth within our contemporary world, presenting Orfeus as a foreigner in an age of nativism and xenophobia, and highlighting the richness that outsiders bring to our societies. The 21st century Underworld that we will create will throw a light on those who are marginalized, exploited and oppressed. I will design the projections that complement the musical and poetic scores. Orfeus will be staged in several festivals in South Africa in 2021 before heading abroad.
Lament of the Beasts.
The third in the trilogy of collaborations, Lament will respond to the environmental emergency that is irreparably damaging the Earth’s biodiversity. This work will spotlight several animals that are threatened with extinction. The work will pay homage to these precious entities that are being eradicated by the thoughtlessness and greed of humanity, and highlight their value within the ecology of the planet and to our own sense of being.
This multi media performance installation will work together as a moving ceremonial, polyphonic ensemble, utilizing text, movement, choral song and music.
Nakanojo Biennale, Japan, 2021.
I will exhibit work and have been asked to select and invite a First Nation artist to participate in the Biennale.
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