Screen-print on paper with plant dye (Buckthorn berries), 2023
Plain Hunt on Four: 2413 is part of the larger Change Ringing series, which brings together Johns’s screen-printing practice and current research in weaving. Here, she sees how visual vibrations can shift our perception of interior space using optical effects and patterns such as the shadow-weave process and moiré (familiar interference patterns that happen when grids of similar sizes are layered and slightly displaced). This image was created using a weaving software that served as a digital mock-up for a woven artwork and as the visual base for this screenprinted work.
Jeanette Johns is a visual artist from Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg who has lived in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal since 2010. She holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba and an MFA from Concordia University. She uses simple images, illusions, or forms, especially those suggesting landscape, architecture, or their innate structures, to point to how we observe and move through space. She reminds viewers of the conventions and principles that govern our understanding of the world and lets intelligible natural phenomena sit as a familiar and poetic voice. This connection to history and time passing also comes through showcasing traditional use of crafts. Johns has focused on printmaking, but recently she has added a new working language by learning to weave on a fourshaft loom.
Johns has taken part in exhibitions and residencies across Canada and internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Toronto Dominion Bank, and Manitoba Hydro and in numerous private collections.