Wednesday 2nd May

Photo credit: Conor Lawless

Kathryn Johnson makes artwork which honours the overlooked. She does this by taking ordinary objects or environments and creating absurd copies. These objects are detailed studies of the originals but use different materials and have varying scale. Giant potatoes made from latex (Potato Barocco, 2006), cheese made of wood, and in her new work for the Exsertus space, she recreates a series of eerie mole hills almost entirely constructed and made from newspaper.

With Johnson’s work the audience is forced to re-appraise her uncanny props, which often portray elements of decay, regurgitation and waste. Her work is undeniably influenced by gothic horror and science fiction and tips its' hat to James Herbert, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft and films such as Alien and The Thing. Her work also has similarities with artists such as Mike Nelson, Ilya Kabakov, Lynda Bengis, Cindy Sherman and Gavin Turk, in that her practice investigates abject states between reality and fiction.

Kathryn Johnson likes to instigate people's natural curiosity and to stimulate their imagination, creating sculptural scenarios which have multiple interpretations. The dazzling effect of her work is that we are offered the chance to indulge ourselves in creating our own fantastic stories and reasons to understand her faux hallucinogenic, bizarre and surreal panoramas.

James Johnson-Perkins