ABOUT THE COLLECTION

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. “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 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.