Heather Johnston

Artist Statement

My work explores emotion as landscape—layered, shifting, and often contradictory. Rather than depicting specific places, I create abstract environments that mirror internal states: moments of joy, tension, softness, ambition, grief, and renewal coexisting within a single visual field. These paintings hold the complexity of transition—the beauty and the disorientation of standing at a new horizon.
Using acrylic, mixed media, and occasional metallic elements, I build surfaces through intuitive mark-making, translucent washes of color, structural lines, and repeated forms. The layering process reflects lived experience: some memories settling quietly beneath the surface, others rising insistently into view. Metallic accents function as points of light; glimmers of clarity, resilience, and self-recognition.
Color acts as both mood and movement, guiding the eye without prescribing a single narrative. Rhythmic marks suggest patterns found in nature; growth, erosion, clustering, and flow,while remaining intentionally ambiguous. Structure and spontaneity coexist, much like identity itself during seasons of change.
I invite viewers to project their own emotional geographies onto the work. Each painting becomes less a destination and more a passage—an atmosphere to move through. My work represents rediscovery, reclamation, and the courage to evolve. It reflects what it feels like to move through the world tender, chaotic, luminous, and unresolved.