Brooke Johnson: Invention of Make-Believe
The Art Gallery of Northumberland
Visit Gallery“…an exploration of the overlooked, a celebration of the extraordinary within the ordinary, and a testament to the boundless possibilities that emerge when imagination meets the remnants of our world.” Olinda Casimiro, Art Gallery of Northumberland
This exhibit is a collection of sculptural stories, created from found objects, both natural and man-made.
Artist Statement
My creative process for these artworks differed from piece to piece, but always I would begin with something that I had found. I had a great deal of inspiration in Northeastern Georgian Bay where we lived for seven summers onboard our boat. I continually explored the shorelines and islands and sometimes found either driftwood or water-logged chunks from old pier constructions, or a piece of wood with an intriguing shape.
I would clean the piece and sit with it for a long time, imagining what it was, who lived in it…and what it might become. That was true with Gotcha!, The Sandhills, Outport Fishing Stage, and The Baby Kraken Wakes!.
I generally don’t begin knowing what I will create, nor with an idea I want to express. At some point while I’m working at whatever it is, it becomes apparent where it could go, and the idea of what it could express blooms out of that. Once a direction becomes clearer, I might search again for specific materials: for example, for the Outport sculpture I needed tiny sun-bleached hardwood twigs (as softwood would break too easily), which meant many days of voyaging to search different windward shorelines. For Chameleon dell Arte, I began with two bare, twisted sticks, and fashioned a wonky ladder with wooden barbeque skewers as rungs, and decided it could lean against the bit of tree I had already found that had a hole from a previous branch…
So overall, the enterprise involved finding and imagining and then seeking, and then more conjecture, then trying (and failing) then discovering and, eureka! (I believe the word eureka! must always have an exclamation mark.)
While building these pieces, I realized that my sculpture process reminded me of the theatre, a world I have lived in on-and-off since I was a teenager. It involves questions and discovery, the necessity of invention, throwing yourself out there, trying and failing…a process similar to rehearsal. And while the sculpture creation is a solo pursuit, there is a good deal of collaboration that comes from revamping mechanical parts or incorporating fragments of rock and root to something malleable, like wax. The workbench is a place where I have wrangled openly with a shift-throttle assembly, discussed illuminating possibilities with a starter nosecone, and haggled with a pile of sticks. The collaboration is between something man-made, something of the earth, and me, leading to decisions of character through conflict, play, passion, hope, and humour, resulting in (eureka!) a story.
