Ella Johnston
Ella Johnston
Ella Johnston, Aftermath, 2025, chicory, ink and body lotion on paper, 360cm x 197cm. Photography by Tessa Hallmann.
Aftermath is a meditation on violence and humanity’s destructive tendencies. It also interrogates the dissonance between the culture and rhetoric of conflict and the reality it leaves behind. Made from paper, the installation is intended to be ambiguous in form and to evoke a sense of the uncanny. The use of paper, soaked in chicory with ink strokes applied with improvised mark-making tools, seek to reflect how tenuous our own lives are and the vulnerability of our bodies and minds. The piece is deliberately ‘tumbledown’ to communicate frailty and an unnerving sense of precariousness.
Percy John Delf Smith, Thiepval after the Battles, 1916. Photography by Tessa Hallmann.
Etching depicting the aftermath of destruction
Biography
With its foundations grounded in drawing, Ella Johnston’s practice is an ongoing investigation, and enjoyment, of mark-making processes, gesture, the calligraphic line and the meaning, or non-meaning, ascribed to them. Her recent work tackles concepts of nostalgia, homesickness, text and memory, with recent deep dives into the idea of palimpsests; the writing and overwriting of histories.
Her body of work as a whole seeks to interrogate the vulnerability of existence. Her paintings, drawings, prints and 3D pieces contemplate how lives (human, animal and plant) fall victim to the whims of the powerful and the forces of capitalism. This is very much reflected in her paper and ink installation at the Beecroft. In the work she uses gestural layers of paint, ink marks, brush strokes and distorted, crumbled paper folds to communicate the destruction caused by war, the constant rewriting of narrative and the frailty of our condition.
She is co-founder of the small indie book publisher and art project Dunlin Press.