| Project title: DWELL | |
| Location: 250 Gallery, Ponsonby, Auckland, New Zealand | |
| Date(s): 29 Feb – 23 March 2024 |
Artist Statement
Charlotte E. Johnson is a British-born artist, currently living and working in Auckland. DWELL was Charlotte’s second solo exhibition and her final submission towards a Masters of Fine Art. Charlotte has exhibited across Aotearoa-New Zealand as part of solo and group exhibitions, and pieces are held in the New Zealand Maritime Museum, the McGregor Museum, and private collections. Charlotte’s multidisciplinary approach produces emotional artworks inspired by her own thoughts, feelings and experiences.
DWELL is Charlotte’s first public showcase of mixed media artworks and moving image, stepping away from still photography and towards more flowing media to explore her personal sense of identity.
Contextual Statement
Our sense of belonging and the concept of roots can have a huge impact on our personal identity. This is typically established through family and place. To dwell is to live in a place or in a certain way but, used as a phrasal verb, to dwell on [something] is to be absorbed by a negative thought. In this project, I created a range of mixed media works and a moving image and sound piece to communicate my struggles with belonging and identity since voluntarily moving to New Zealand from my birth country (UK) over six years ago.
“…does even serial familiarity with places satisfy deeper longing for roots and continuity as we come to terms with a way of life that disregards them?” – Lucy Lippard
This project realised my interests in concepts of liminality, temporality, and liquidity, and how related life experiences have affected my sense of identity. It became clear that a static moment captured in a photograph was not the best way to communicate these concepts, so I sought new ways of working. Kevin Meethin wrote of beachscapes “Beaches are ‘edge spaces’ both physically and metaphorically, and feature significantly in British culture and public memory”. Thus, I chose to collaborate with the landscape at Piha beach (Auckland, NZ) to make a moving image and sound piece, as well as creating a body of paintings, employing and expanding upon a technique shown to me by my mother.
As John Burnside wrote of identity and place, “Identity…can only be sustained by transactions, whether with other human beings, or with a living and changing environment”. Part of this project was experiential and involved multiple day trips to ‘the gap’ at Piha. The ocean there reminds me of the west Cornwall coastline where I grew up and where my mother still resides. Similarly to the expressive and uncontrolled works of Meghann Riepenhoff’s Littoral Drift (2015-22), I physically incorporated place into my ocean-inspired paintings by adding seawater, taken from Piha. The works attempt to visualise the movement of waves and use seawater to create unique textures, while diving into the nostalgia of creating the first works with my mother in her home, strengthening my connection and identity (Sedikides & Wildschut, 2018).
The moving image and sound piece sits within the context of works that inspired me. As in Adam Laity’s A short film about ice (2020), I wanted the audience to feel connected to the landscape by bringing emotion to the work, as well as using a range of shot types and equipment available to a solo filmmaker on location. As with Tacita Dean’s Disappearance at sea (1996), I incorporated abstraction and longer takes without zoom or panning to create more evocative scenes, accompanied by immersive field recordings.
I collaborated with gallery manager Tina Franzen at 250 Gallery (Ponsonby, Auckland, NZ) to show these works in March 2024 under the exhibition title DWELL.
Documentation
For more information
www.cejphoto.com
@cej.photo