Karyn Johnstone is a multi-disciplinary artist who explores the contradictions, complexities, and conflicting views of womanhood fuelled by social pressures and the expectations to meet unrealistic beauty standards. Her work challenges societal stereotypes and draws from issues of motherhood, domesticity, sexuality, gender identity, and the lived experience. She uses both painting and sculpture to create her works, with each discipline informing the other.
Her sculptural work combines found and domestic objects that she breaks, smashes, re-purposes, and re-assembles into new works, starting a conversation between female sexual objectification and domesticity. These intertwine like a complex dance where society expects women to play the roles of nurturing homemakers and seductive allure. However, this choreography can trap them in a rigid, unforgiving performance.
Aesthetics are contextually superficial, and she draws on this to captivate the audience before confronting them with the sharpness of obscured realities lurking beneath the illusion. Hiding and revealing layers of sugar-coated playfulness, juxtaposed with dark and conflicting ideas, entices the viewer into a complex narrative that uncovers the cracks within. Exploring the masks and camouflage we invent to hide behind, while aiming to question the ‘male gaze’ and its perception of the female body by using materials traditionally associated with gender, thus challenging the norms of sexuality.
Continuing her exploration of materiality and its impact on narrative and emotional response, the interplay between 2D and 3D materiality gives rise to interconnected landscapes.
She draws inspiration from Art History, particularly the Rococo and late Baroque, which were especially feminine, graceful, ornate, and often playfully piquant. She disrupts this with her contemporary narrative that challenges social compliance, addressing the tension between darkness and beauty, and inviting the viewer to question the conflicting views of womanhood, the ambiguity between vulnerability and strength, and of being a woman versus being feminine.