Clare Johnson

Clare Johnson is a visual artist and writer. Solo exhibitions include North Wall Arts Centre in Oxford, Richard Hugo House, Storefronts Seattle, and Guy’s Hospital in London, where her 35-drawing project about childhood experiences with asthma was acquired for permanent display. Johnson has won the Michael S. Harper Poetry Prize and been a finalist in Hugo House’s New Works Competition; her ongoing Post-it Note Project won a Seattle Magazine Best of 2011 for “Best New Take on the Memoir.” Recent projects include a limited edition book pairing her set of 27 drawings with poems by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Clare received 2014 GAP funding to take time off to focus on the development of a large series of ink drawings based on favorite works of literature. Each drawing will be titled after a small fragment of writing from its book, leaving the meaning open to interpretation and letting the words have more space on their own. Clare intends to highlight the possibilities in these quotes, uncovering them from the larger texts and letting them have an additional life and power of their own.