Annie May Johnston

Lives and works in Austin, TX

Artist statement

My daughter's hair curls into spirals, and I am still stunned every day that I made it. The curls led me to the first spiral galaxy, sketched by an astronomer in the 1840s: swirling gas compressing into stars and planets, a black hole turning at the center. Human time and star time were always connected through our nightly relationship with the stars. Most people alive today have never seen the Milky Way. We have traded the sky for streetlights and the glow of our phones, and the light has restricted us to this planet, to the world in front of our faces. I make performative jewelry at my kitchen table late at night, a baby monitor's white noise keeping me company. Polymer clay embedded with human hair, children's beads, glow-in-the-dark stars, shrunken polystyrene. I wear the necklaces around the house at night and take photographs that only I see. I think of them as formed from the original building blocks of the cosmos, perhaps created with the Big Bang and delivered to Earth by asteroid, awaiting discovery. They rest on pedestals built from cardboard, cement-tinted drywall compound, dyed paper pulp, dirt from my yard. The pedestals come from scientific and diorama displays. I want the moment of contact with the earth to matter, the grooves echoing craters or a nest. My print practice changed after I became a mother. It had to move faster. I turned to the Xerox machine and the scanner, collaging and manipulating pictures one step removed from my own hand. There is...

Artwork