Ghosts of the Madrugada will run at Highgate Gallery in South Grove from September 12 to 25 and sees Johnson going “back to her roots” with paintings which draw on the home where she grew up.
She says many of the originals were destroyed by fire in 2015, but she has reimagined these lost paintings and brought them back to life alongside objects from her parents’ extraordinary collections.
During the 80s she collaborated with a number of artists and creatives including film maker Derek Jarman, performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery, film maker and artist John Maybury, sculptor Andrew Logan, and the Michael Clark dance company.
As well as painting, she has made films and penned the travel memoir Surf Mama about moving with her three children to Biarritz where she swapped her paintbrushes for a surfboard and set up a club for women who wanted to surf.
Johnson, who now lives in Waterloo and has a studio in Bethnal Green, creates vivid dreamscapes in which real people cross paths with goddesses, gorgons and mythological creatures.
‘It touched my soul’ was inspired by her 99-year-old mother recounting a dream in which she wandered through Queen’s Wood until she reached the ruins of her former home, where she saw one of her daughter’s paintings
illuminated by a shaft of light.
Johnson’s work is also influenced by her travels to Oaxaca, Mexico, the Dingle Peninsula, and Biarritz.
She has recently exhibited at Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, National Galleries of Scotland, the Whitworth in Manchester, Re/Sisters at the Barbican, and Radical Landscapes at Tate Liverpool.
She also performed a body painted lecture at Tate Britain and made appearances at the Globe Theatre in Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World.
Find Wilma Johnson on instagram @gallerywilma
