Helen Johnson

Helen Johnson was born in 1979 on Wurundjeri Woi‑wurrung Country in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria, and she continues to live and work there today.

Renowned for her revaluation of historic social events and the power structures that shape them, Johnson creates layered, meticulously composed paintings that weave together imagery, gesture, and historical inquiry.

Over decades of practice she has developed a painterly language of varying tactility, pace and reference, which she applies as a means to articulate inner worlds and address personal experience along with its broader historical underpinnings.

Johnson also practices as an art therapist, working primarily in acute mental health. The ethic of art upon which art therapy is predicated – as an expressive language beyond words, as a connector that can support healing, and as an intuitive process that is not concerned with finish, presentation or critical reception – has become a sort of interlocutor for Johnson’s personal art practice, a quiet, grounding element and a true reminder of what art can do.