ANIMATE EARTH: PRACTICES OF DEVOTION

Body of work by Catskill, NY artists Emily Johnston & Sarah Mitchell-Davison

ARTISTS’ STATEMENT

“We both live in the woods on a mountainside, and in retrospect, I think we probably both sensed this right away, a similar calibration in how we create.”

Sarah’s glazes recall stone, lichen, mosses, they wrap like a skin over the wide open dimpled surfaces of her vessels. At once loose and refined. Emily’s paintings are made with stones—gathered by the stream that runs along the main street across from her studio and processed into pigments. Painted on paper, they dance as though returned to the ancient ocean floor where they once accumulated, returned to their pre-sedimentary aquatic life. 

The artists hiked together last fall, finding pigments, textures, and camaraderie. That day, a patch of grasses carrying tiny seed hulls shook in the crisp morning air. In Sarah’s studio, the remembered form became clay, then grew and grew into the potent sculptural forms we on exhibit today, seeming in their scale to remind us of the new possibility of new life swelling from the smallest seed. Emily went home that day and began, with her mortar and pestle, with her brush, to ask the pigments what they wanted to become. Their responses sometimes surprised her in their lack of restraint. This show is a multi-way collaboration: the one you see is between two artists, the ones you don’t transpire beneath the snow-flattened bed of fall leaves, in the sun shining between the pine needles, on the mornings when the artists wanted to get right to work, but walked up the hill to greet their more than human kin first. 

I spent a star age in flames

Bolted to the black heavens

Waiting for you.

Light crept over the still of the earth

A thousand upon ten thousand years

But no light touched me

Deep in the depthless time

Waiting for you

.

Fate flung me out,

Hauled me here

To love as a stone loves

Waiting for you.

Touch me, butterfly.

Like you, I have no hands.

Kiss me, rain.

Like you, I have no mouth.

Snow sit heavily upon me.

Like you, I can only wait.

Come to me dear

Unenduring little

Human animal

I have no voice

But your voice.

Sing to me. Speak.

Let the clouds fly over us.

I have spent a star age I flames

Just to hold you.

— Louise Erdrich, “Stone Love”

“We’re united by our devotion to learning to be with our ecosystems, to practicing the kind of presence that de-centers our human experience and gives voice to the beings who do not have one.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Emily Johnston

Emily Johnston practices close to the earth. Her career has brought her gradually into more intimate relationship with nature. First known for her large scale abstract landscape photographs, then a well-received photo series documenting drawings made with ashes on snow, the artist then began to work in mixed media, sometimes using found charcoal, asking how the body’s intersection with outside forces—natural and human-made, their rhythms, cycles, disruptions—manifests in gesture on paper and canvas.  

The latest iteration of Emily’s practice often finds her on her knees by a stream, foraging rocks for the earth pigments she paints with, mixing them with river water. The process is spiritual and rooted in a desire for transformation: of our relationship with the land, and consequently of the cultural forces that threaten Life on our planet. Offering a frame of geological time to our day to day experiences, Emily’s paintings, reverently made from earth pigments, embody the possibility for a different future than the uncertain one we otherwise foresee.

A founding member of Brooklyn-based drawing performance group BAND PRACTICE, her work has been exhibited by galleries such as Picture Room, 1053 Gallery, Bushel Collective, Still House, Ed. Varie, Sad Gallery in Brooklyn, and Galerie Brun L’Eglise in Paris. Most recently, in 2022 she exhibited a selection from seven years of drawings at Birdsong Community Garden in Delhi, NY. Her images and writing have been published in the journal Documentum, edited by Teju Cole, and last year in Producing Humans, by Dr. Iris Cushing. Emily is an American artist raised in Paris and living in the Western Catskills of New York.

Sarah Mitchell-Davison

Sarah Mitchell-Davison's work is both textural and fluid. Her coiled and slab built sculptural stoneware vessels are often organic in shape revealing impressions left by her hands.

Sarah is an emerging ceramic artist working out of her West Kill, NY based studio Arc Ceramics.She is inspired by the cyclical nature of her surroundings and this environment flows through her work. 

Most of Sarah's work is experimental and continues to evolve. She is interested in the journey, the process and how the pieces ultimately communicate their story through form and surface. She is always looking for new materials and methods, even leaning into accidental discoveries to move her art forward. Her studio time and her hands in clay are her calm space, a place of reflection and open-ended exploration. 

WINTER SOLSTICE - ‘JOY is where it's AT’

W.s. Studio’s Inaugural Exhibition:

‘JOY is where it's AT’ opened November 10th, 2023 with artists Brooke Noel Morgan & Tara Vaughan Thornton.

The theme for the opening exhibition came about through deeply collaborative and inspired conversations with each artist. JOY as an aspirational target became clear, as the pursuit in finding such a state, even in the most challenging times, can bring much needed levity to the lived experience and our creative mediums alike.

JOY is in fact where it is at, we all just have to find it.

—

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

BROOKE NOEL MORGAN IS AN ARTIST BASED IN NASHVILLE, TN.

Brooke’s journey began with teaching. Now, she practices various art forms: painting, poetry, and interior curation. Brooke’s work is characterized by abstract organic form and a deep connection to Mother Nature.

TARA VAUGHAN THORNTON IS AN ARTISTS BASED IN GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT.

Tara Vaughan is an abstract artist interested in organic forms and balance. Inspired by nature, connection, female forms and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Valentine Schlegel, she hand-builds ceramic sculptures in her studio.