Sandra Johnston

Sandra Johnston’s artworks often involve exploring the aftermath of trauma through acts of commemoration that exist as forms of live testimony and empathetic receptiveness. Her performances are experiential in nature, based on improvisational processes that explore physical states of responsiveness, formed in relation to the actualities of specific situations and the moment of making. Actions are assembled using mainly found objects, each offering the Johnston different kinds of tactile stimulation, informing through memory and haptic perception – as opposed to conceptual devising. The performances are intended as propositions, whereby the audience observes the emergence of latent relationships between materials and gestures, offered as ‘provisional behaviors’ and existing unapologetically as irrational, incomplete and mutable encounters.

Sandra Johnston has been active internationally since 1992 as an artist and researcher working predominantly through performance art, video installations, drawing and writing. Johnston’s practice is rooted in processes of improvisation and typically actions involve a sparsity of materials and attentiveness to context. The physical somatic aspects of the work develop from an ethos of attrition – consciously attempting to use a minimum of available resources, intersecting with a desire to leave little or no trace. This approach of provisionality insists upon a speculative relationship to the emergence of narratives and meanings being formed directly, and conjointly, between artist and audience.

Artist announcement for Convergence Festival 2025 : Borderless Romance