Jess Johnson - Various Works (2024)

Jess Johnson and Cynthia Johnson - The Tower of Babel (2024)

Jess Johnson’s recent textile works Necrotic Scroll (2024), Tower of Babel (2024), and We Can’t Keep Going the Way We’ve Been Going but We Know No Other Way to Go (2024) mark a fascinating turn in her practice. Known for her complex worlds built through drawing and virtual reality, Johnson has translated that language into quilts and fabric banners, pulling her speculative cosmologies into the realm of touch.

I’m very interested in how she uses textile traditions like quilting to materialise systems of belief. Tower of Babel in particular feels like a collision of myth and material: ancient narrative reimagined through cloth, colour, and repetition. There’s something devotional about these pieces which I attribute to my own valuation of labour and craft; particularly those which are considered traditionally feminine or domestic (and subsequently denigrated from the world of contemporary fine art).

Jess Johnson and Cynthia Johnson - Necrotic Scroll (2024)

This move into textile feels political too. Quilts and banners have long been associated with collective labour, protest, and storytelling: from suffragette banners to community quilts. By bringing her otherworldly architectures into this format, Johnson connects speculative fiction to a lineage of feminist and communal making, and practically realises this by co-creating some of these artworks with Cynthia Johnson.

I’m drawn to how this resonates with my own work. They can carry cosmologies, grief, protest and devotion. Johnson’s quilts and banners feel like portals, but also warnings; tactile, beautiful reminders that belief systems, like fabrics, are always being stitched, unpicked, and remade.

Jess Johnson - we can’t keep going the way we’ve been going but we know no other way to go (2024)