Helen Johnson

Helen Johnson is a Naarm (Melbourne-based) artist known for her large-scale figurative paintings. Her works often critically examine colonial histories, power structures, and cultural and social narratives using layered imagery, text, and symbolic motifs that invite viewers to question Australia’s past and its ongoing impact.

Leapyear Ladies Pop is a large canvas consisting of textured and flat layers that limit the viewer’s ability to discern between the foreground and the background, blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration.

Leapyear Ladies Pop is a critique of both colonialism and sexism that emerged from European patriarchal power structures. The work depicts a reproduction of a cartoon that was originally published in an 1876 police gazette circulated in the colony of Port Phillips. This cartoon depicts the leap year tradition that allows a woman to propose to a man on 29 February.

While the idea of this tradition may seem progressive, particularly in the nineteenth century, Johnson challenges that idea, stating ‘the archival image depicts an inversion but in doing so reinforces the status quo’. A tradition that is governed by the calendar reinforces a cycle of control that is interconnected to institutions of law enforcement patriarchy and colonisation.

In 2024, Johnson became an art therapist at which time her work shifted from interrogation of historical events to a more intuitive and loose style of expression. Working in this way, Johnson leaves her paintings open to interpretation by posing questions rather than providing answers. Her paintings of hands (Those visions are true and Visit over, madam, 2024) offer few clues as to the meaning of their content. The hands relate ambiguously to one another, as well as to the other elements depicted in the works, such as the speech bubbles.

Text by Amelia Winata, from Yield Strength Catalogue