“You must have been in strange places”
Helen Johnson
4 June → 19 June 2004

You must have been in strange places exists in a region of paradox where the compulsion to fill unknown spaces with imaginings collides with the [colonial] desire to capture, manage and tame the landscape – how we inhabit the landscape, and in turn how it occupies us. It is concerned with the re-making of meaning at points where different modes of understanding intersect. To refer to an idea of nature is to refer to a construct arising from a cultural outlook. Here the referee takes the form of an environment which is both real and imagined, soft and sinister, becoming a representative of the intractable nature of the landscape as it exists in our perceptions.

Helen Johnson graduated from Honours in a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT in 2002. She currently holds a studio residency at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces.

The artist would like to acknowledge Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and J J Davies & Sons Felts for their generous support and assistance.