Hannah Johnston
Hannah Johnston is a multimedia artist fascinated by the evolution of mark-making. After spending her final year dissecting and reimagining primitive art, she studies what it would look like if the same techniques were applied to our modern world of online dependence. Cave painting demonstrates craftsmanship, each work is a process; from making their own materials from scratch, to drawing designs from memory, to then embedding these sketches into the wall multiple times for maximum pigmentation, all just to ‘leave their mark’. Each step requires patience and skill. Her practice explores these themes, incorporating them with more specialised mark-making techniques, by using the computer as a collaboration tool. Her work crashes and unites the two different design worlds, the physical and the digital.
About Hannah’s Practice
My Cave
‘My Cave’ is a piece that has evolved from the start to the end of my year as an Interaction Design student. My studio space was remodeled into my own cave by lining the wall of my studio with linen, and by embedding a print into my wall to conclude each line of research or development, to mimic the process of cave painting. As my practice, technique and learning grew so did my environment, my walls witnessing the evolution of my presence in its space.
‘I Was Here’ Motion Sensor
This work reimagines what caves could look like in today’s world, capturing shadows and silhouettes, and how they layer and grow over time, experimenting with light. Using a motion sensor and Processing I was able to reconstruct this vision.
Painting Series
From working with Processing and motion sensors, I captured the relationship between the computer and the artist, making canvas compositions interactive. The layering of videoed silhouettes was painted with acrylic on canvases made from recycled materials. By then using these painting outputs as computer inputs for a computer-generated model, this collaboration continued, the outcomes being stitched to conclude the series.
