Story-Laden by Johanna Connor © 2024
I draw, as if through a lens, editing the visible and the invisible; striving to extract some of the hidden magic from the mundane. The potential titles jostle during the process of drawing and in discussion sometimes with Michael until they fix themselves. Finding a title is serious business.
In my looking, I find myself lost in a thicket of significant meaning, where the traces remain from the activity of people in their endeavours, where the friction of lives leave their marks on the landscape and the landscape of things: where the furrows drawn deep remain in the tilt of the soil, where the hollow in a horizon holds a story, where the scale expressed in the husbandry of the land reveals another scale of means, where the proportions chosen express an aesthetic personal, communal or indeed global, where the strata reveals the architecture of social and cultural evolution, where we’re mistaken by our assumptions and caught in the wire of nostalgia, where the landscape simply has the indelible, although at times, the faintest, footprint impressed upon its surface.
Beauty in a scene, which at first glance, appears to be strangely ordinary is what truly interests me and it’s through the process of drawing that I strive to reveal this. I seek traces that are current or historic, are seasonal or daily or are simply once in time. A trace of something magic lying within the mundane.
© 2024
Squeakless
You’ve got a friend in me
Stand Alone
Unremembered
Currently concentrating on the second of two joint exhibitions, with Michael Quane RHA. The first was at Blue House Gallery, Schull, August 2024 and the second will open at the Lavit Gallery, Cork, from May 22nd to June 14th 2025. Paper - Pencil - Chisel - Stone is an exhibition of work determined through the act of drawing on the artists respective media of paper and stone.
She exhibits at the Blue House Gallery, in the West Cork Creates annual exhibitions, in the West Cork Arts Centre Members and Friends Exhibitions.
In 2023 the Lavit gallery took her work as part of their Winter Exhibition 2023 and in 2024 she was delighted when two of her drawings were selected for the RHA 194th Annual Exhibition.
Her work can be seen:
Along with their independent art practices, Johanna and her husband Michael continue to develop
2 STUDIOS : ONE GALLERY.
A work in progress, these two working studios and exhibition space open their doors to the public annually as part of Culture Night.
Visits can also be arranged for groups and/or private individuals, simply…