Anita Johnson

Born Wollongong, Australia

Lives & Works Wollongong (Tharawal)

Anita Johnson’s art practice is concerned with the brokenness of things, notions of repair, and human experiences of longing, mending and states of transition. The familiar domestic objects that she transforms into sculptures are salvaged objects chosen for their history of close human interaction. The flaws, cracks, and missing parts of a salvaged object give her material ways of intervening in the usual reading of that object.

Pushing the object toward the unexpected and improbable, to become a poetic and psychologically affective thing, she often re-makes the object or brings about unexpected connections with the human body and sensual materials such as felt, textiles, clay and beeswax.

Johnson completed a Bachelor of Visual Art at Sydney College of the Arts in 1993 and is currently a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at Wollongong University, focusing on concepts of brokenness and repair within contemporary assemblage practice.

Her work has featured in numerous group exhibitions including the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, the UWS Acquisitive Sculpture Award, Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, the Blake Prize, Sculptural Felt International, Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, the Tamworth Textile Triennial, David Harold Tribe Sculpture Award, the 6th International World Textile Biennial of Contemporary Art, Mexico, the Beijing International Art Biennale, the International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Miami, and Still: The National Still Life Award. In 2023 Johnson won the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize with her work Tenderness.

Johnson’s work is represented in public collections including the Macquarie University Sculpture Park, Wollongong Art Gallery, the National Textile Collection, Westmead Hospital, Tamworth Regional Gallery, University of Wollongong, Woollahra Municipal Council, Maitland Regional Art Gallery and the Australian War Memorial Art Collection.