Jeni Johnson

Jeni Johnson is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores atmosphere, material memory and the relationship between body, land and cosmology. Working across painting, paper, thread and clay, she creates immersive “fields” that investigate emergence, transmission and states of passage.

Her recent work centres on circular painting forms known as Orbital Bodies: restrained spacial works built through layers of earth pigment, chalk grounds, wax, paper and gesture. These paintings operate as thresholds rather than images, holding tensions between presence and absence, silence and signal, gravity and air.

Alongside painting, Johnson develops constellation maps and ceramic relics that extend her ongoing inquiry into planetary systems, ecological consciousness and embodied ritual. Her practice draws from prehistoric cosmologies, landscape, somatic experience and contemporary material abstraction. 

She lives between London and East Sussex.

My practice is shaped by a background in learning, teaching and participatory work, alongside movement between Sussex and London and an ongoing return to rural studio making. These experiences continue to inform an approach that values slowness, material attention and the relationship between body, atmosphere and place.