Georgina Johnson

Words by Hannah Geddes

Enter the polymath ­– Georgina Johnson is an artist, curator, producer and founder of The Laundry Arts. The latter engages with the “curious, visionary and creatively courageous” and is a creative platform and growing global network of thinkers, commentators and artistic practitioners. She is a multi-disciplinary artist who doesn’t want to be defined by labels and when it comes down to it, her practice is all about “story telling”. The different mediums she works with are vehicles for telling these narratives and tackling socio-political ideologies.

Johnson graduated with a fashion degree from UAL but quickly started working with photographers and making zines. Finding it “difficult to manoeuvre round the industry and find ways in,” Johnson started her own platform The Laundry arts in late 2017, with the aim to promote and support largely emerging artists and specifically creatives that are Black, or POC as well as womxn. Johnson didn’t come from a traditional “art background”. Her parents didn’t work in the industry so there “was no handbook or rule book, [she] just figured it out.” She has managed to get funding for exhibitions and residencies from the outset. This is partly down to her good “bartering skills” but mainly down to the depth of her ideas and that of those she wishes to support. The partners, clients and collaborators that The Laundry and Johnson independently have worked with so far have had to acknowledge the lack of diversity in the arts that she has been interrogating for some time, and while they did not have the tools or ability to address it, Johnson did.

For Johnson though, it’s not just about youth. With the plethora of digital publications, zines and collectives that support young artists, it’s easy to miss valuable conversations happening amongst those more experienced. Johnson is “interested in what people who are more mature have to say because often they just live life and can tell you to chill out and not take life so seriously”, so having intergenerational conversations is important to her practise and the culture of The Laundry. Along with Laundry Arts, Johnson has been working on her personal work for the last few years. She has been experimenting with digital collages and pairing manipulated images with short text. She takes old family photos collected from her Nan’s house along with her own personal photos as the starting point for the collages.

“My mum said that when I was young there was a time when I was obsessed with people’s facial expressions, trying to figure out what they meant. I didn’t have a wide enough vocabulary at the time to try and explain it, as I was pretty young, but I was clearly intrigued by meaning and gestures and silent languages. I am obsessed by quirkiness and especially with the meaning put on to Black women’s facial expressions and how beauty is packaged through a white lens mainly. To me, when a Black woman isn’t smiling, it’s not offensive, or aggressive – why should they make themselves palatable for you? While my images are funny and ironic and a bit silly, they’re commenting on things that I have experienced and that the people in the images who have now grown up have experienced before. I am always thinking about conversations that I am having here and there – piecing these images, facial expressions and bodily gestures together to form a picture that makes sense to me and the broader we.”

Working with InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, she plays around to create a melange of psychedelic backgrounds to place her foregrounding warped collages on top of - often revisiting each image several times until she is happy with the outcome. As she slowly edges away from working solely within the fashion industry “which feels very constricting”, she is focusing on work that she enjoys; “moving forward towards hope and joy but understanding that they, these works are inherently political because of the story myself and people like myself are given from the jump.” There is a tendency to over-intellectualise work and Johnson wants to both push against and address that in a candid way through her practice. In this space she is making room for mistakes and surprise and simply making for making sake rather than for a deadline or project specifically, she’s putting work out there because it’s what she’s enjoying at the moment.

Starting an arts platform alongside working as an artist has taken perseverance.  On reflection, Johnson admits she would have changed a few things, she wouldn’t have taken it all so seriously and felt as though time was constantly running out. It’s a common anxiety in the creative industries with so few genuine paid opportunities for creatives exacerbating this.

“It’s all fun and games to say you can be an artist and live off 2p a week but no, it’s not in practice and especially not in London. There needs to be more transparency about how people are paid and how they get jobs. Most of the work I get is from recommendations or me reaching out. I get told no all the time but after a while it doesn’t sound like anything, so you move on and try someone/something else. If you are figuring out how to make it just don’t think about it too much, do things you like, fall into community and try to keep good relationships with people - do the side jobs if you need to.”

Although she appears to be working all the time, she is striving to become more balanced, explaining that, “busy doesn’t get you anywhere, you can be busy but standing still, it doesn’t always add up to progress all the time.” It’s “important to see friends, have fun, laugh, eat and importantly sleep, you don’t have to work every minute of the day.”

Already planning her next projects, Johnson is thinking about how her work can become “more physical – by moving into screen printing and sculpture” while still using the forms, colours and resources that she has been working with in her digital collages. But as always, she has wise words, - she’s just going to let the work go “in its own direction without forcing it. There’s my idea and there’s the things that just happen when you try and do something, so I am just going to let it all fall into place.”

Landry Arts are currently running a series of reading workshops with Iniva. The final session will be on 22 March 2020: iniva.org

Johnson is launching her first book, an anthology entitled “The Slow Grind: Finding Our Way Back to Creative Balance” in late April 2020.  

 @saint_lovie / @thelaundryarts